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EU wants Spain to accept more asylum seekers

Xinhua, May 28, 2015 Adjust font size:

The European Commission will ask Spain to take in 4,288 asylum seekers after announcing new quotas on Wednesday.

The executive body of the European Union rejected an appeal by Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo, who had stressed Spain's economic difficulties and high unemployment rate as a reason why his country should not be asked to take in any more immigrants.

"Pledging to take in migrants to whom you cannot provide work would in my opinion be providing a bad service," Garcia-Margallo had said earlier this month.

He argued that the quotas failed to take into account the "huge effort we (Spain) are making to control migration from Morocco, Mauritania and Senegal which impacts the whole EU."

The 4,288 of a total of 40,000 asylum seekers, mainly Syrians and Eritreans, who are currently in Italy and Greece is roughly half of the total Germany is being asked to take and around 60 percent of the numbers going to France.

The quota which decides how many asylum seekers are designated to each country is calculated depending on the population of each EU nation as well as economic growth and unemployment and former acceptance of immigrants.

Spain had asked for the unemployment rate and the past record on immigration to be given more importance in the calculation.

The United Nations estimated that at least 60,000 people have tried to cross the Mediterranean in 2015 with at least 1,800 losing their lives trying to reach Europe. Endit