BARCELONA (Sputnik) – Lack of trust among refugees about European countries of intended destination other than Germany and Sweden impedes the European Union resettlement program, UN refugee agency UNHCR spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said Tuesday.
“First of all you have to convince the refugees, and to gain their trust, that if they arrive in Greece or Italy and they are relocated, that they are going to be going to a place that’s going to treat them well,” Fleming told RIA Novosti in an interview.
Fleming cited a range of difficulties – from lack of political will to manpower and logistics – inhibiting the success of the refugee quota in addition to the refugees being reluctant to travel to assigned EU member states.
As of early November, under 150 refugees out of an announced 160,000 have been sent from frontier EU member states Italy and Greece to Spain, Luxembourg and Sweden in the month that the scheme became operational.
UN refugee agency UNHCR spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said that "aging" Europe could be the economic beneficiary of properly managed migrant arrivals.
"If done in a smart way, it could actually benefit Europe," Fleming said.
The UNHCR spokeswoman stressed that "a lot of convincing" needs to be done for European leaders to recognize that migrants can serve as "something that can be turned into an opportunity."
Fleming acknowledged that substantial upfront investment would be needed to properly manage migration from abroad, but the long-term result would be a "booming" European economy.
"Europe needs immigration, Europe is aging," she observed further.
The European Union and its frontier member states are currently at the epicenter of the largest migrant crisis since World War II as hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers have crossed its borders.
