Media: Mass migration from Kosovo not abating

Source: Tanjug

BELGRADE -- Mass migrations from Kosovo do not seem to abate as thousands of families are setting off for EU countries and their children dropping out of school.

This is according to the Pristina media who on Wednesday quoted the local Ministry of Education, Tanjug reported.
The Kosovo Ministry of Education released the "alarming statistics" late on Tuesday according to which 5,200 students have dropped out of school in Kosovo over the past few months, intending to enroll in schools in some of the Western countries, the Albanian-language media reported.

Advisor to the Kosovo minister of education Azem Guri stated that the dropouts mostly include fifth- and sixth-grade primary school students.

He noted that the number of students who have dropped out of school over the past few months constitutes a reason for grave concern, and warned that the number of people migrating from Kosovo on a daily basis is on the rise.

As many as ten buses depart from the bus stations in Pristina, Gnjilane and Urosevac every night to take Kosovo citizens afflicted by extreme poverty to EU countries (mainly Germany, France and Austria) where they hope to find jobs and better living conditions for their families, states the release.

Officials of the bus station in Pristina confirmed that all bus seats have been already booked until February 10 for departures to take Kosovo citizens to various destinations abroad.

Around 20,000 people from Kosovo depart for western European countries on a monthly basis, Koha Ditore daily newspaper recently reported.

Kosovo citizens were the most numerous group among asylum seekers who filed their asylum applications in Austria in January, and Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner called for a change in the asylum-granting procedure in mid-January.

She underscored that she wants to introduce a faster procedure to decide on the asylum applications filed by citizens coming from the so-called 'safe countries', Kosovo being one of them, so that these people would not stay in Austria long.

According to the data of the Austrian government, 1,091 people requested asylum in the country in 2014 and a total of 1,000 requests were filed in January 2015, which Minister Mikl-Leitner qualified as a major migration.

Last year, asylum seekers from Kosovo filed 8,923 requests in Germany, which is by 101 percent more than in 2013, according to the latest data of the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees.