Parts of Austria are reporting surging crime after Germany started turning away one in 10 migrants who try to cross the border.
The situation is now so bad in one town near the border that passengers have asked officials to accompany them as they wait for trains, due to the huge number of migrants at the station.
At the crossing point near Scharding, around 300 people a day are being denied entry and Germany and sent back into Austria. Many of them are congregating at the train station in nearby Linz, where police say Moroccan migrants have started causing trouble.
The Daily Mail reports that one father wrote an open letter to regional governor Josef Pühringer saying his teenage daughter was scared to go out alone.
“My daughter is 16 and is terrified when she has to come through Linz train station in the evening,” he wrote.
“As a result, we have now arranged a travel group with other parents.
“My wife and I went to see it for ourselves. We travelled the same route that our daughter did and we found out that it was even worse than she described.
“There was not a policeman in sight and in a country like Austria it cannot be the case that our children are scared going to and from work.”
Joachim Zandl, a train security spokesman, said: “Especially with late trains, there are increasingly passengers that ask us to accompany them on the platforms because they are afraid.”
Austria has been tightening its own border controls recently, with Germany now following suit. Chancellor Werner Faymann said that Germany would be forced to follow Austria’s example, telling Kurier that governments need to “look at the reality” of the migrant crisis of that is overwhelming the continent.
Nonetheless, Mr Faymann still faces embarrassment after both he and his German counterpart Angela Merkel backed an open borders policy last year before being forced to perform a u-turn.
In October, he told the press: “The captain has the ship under control. Angela Merkel keeps her word.”
Austria is now considering a daily cap on the number of migrants allowed to cross the border from neighbouring Slovenia after receiving on of the largest number of asylum applications per capita or any European country.
The small central European state of around nine million people processed 90,000 asylum applications last year.
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