In the bill that was voted to tighten measures for addressing the immigration issue, Thanos Plevris referred to the codification of three key points of this legislation.
Plevris: “If you’re not entitled to asylum, you can’t burden society”
Specifically, the Minister of Migration and Asylum speaking on Wednesday morning (3/9) on Action 24, initially stated that “we don’t give any opportunity to anyone who enters illegally to be legalized, no matter how many years pass. When you enter illegally, you will always remain illegal”.
He added that: “We criminalize illegal stay. If an asylum application is rejected, there is automatically a criminal offense with 2-5 years imprisonment, and the only option is to cooperate in order to return to the country they came from. If asylum has been rejected, it means they came from a country where they are not in danger”.
Thanos Plevris continued saying: “If you are not entitled to asylum, your right is to return, you cannot burden society. There are persecuted people but also spoiled ones. I went to facilities and you see in the open ones where you host people who eat, drink and move around freely, about 20% cause damage. The tables are bolted down because if they get annoyed with the food they flip them over”.
Regarding Crete he said that “there will be a facility since from the beginning of the year the flows are 27,000 and of these, 12,000 were in Crete. It has become a corridor that we want to limit, but for the next period we cannot eliminate it completely. In the first phase, we are in consultation with local government to have three temporary sites. We have them in Chania and Rethymno and we are looking for one in Heraklion. The coming months of September and October are months when there are migration flows”.
In conclusion, he explained that “the networks choose points without facilities because their goal is for migrants to be transferred quickly to the mainland”.
