Latvians protest against migrant quotas

Nationalists picketed after the government agreed to EU plans to resettle asylum applicants from Africa and the Middle East. Latvia, with its population of 2 million, would take in 250 people.

The former Soviet Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania have not fully recovered from the bottoming out of world markets in 2008, and plans to disperse 40,000 migrants across the EU's 28 nations over two years have sparked protest.

On Tuesday, signs bore slogans like "Genocide against white people" and "Stop Islam" at the event organized by extreme right-wing groups but attended by relatively mainstream lawmakers.

"In my view, the way the European Union tackles the issue only deepens the problem," said Raivis Dzintars, a parliamentarian from nationalist LNNK, a member of the three-party coalition.

The nationalist stance puts the faction at odds with the Unity party of Prime Minister Laimdota Straujuma. Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics, also from Unity, said Latvia had to show solidarity with its EU partners.

"Countries such as Italy, Spain and Portugal have each participated in air patrol missions in the Baltic states twice already," Rinkevics told the daily newspaper "Diena" shortly before Tuesday's protest, referring to NATO missions to deter Russia. "Solidarity is a two-way street."

More people dying

On Tuesday, the International Organization for Migration warned that people were dying in increasing numbers in their attempts to cross the Mediterranean Sea between North Africa and Europe. According to the IOM, 188,000 migrants were rescued so far this year trying to cross the Mediterranean. At least 2,000 have drowned.

More than 40,000 migrants have arrived in roughly equal numbers in Italy and Greece, but nearly all of the deaths in 2015 occurred on the route from Libya to the Italian island of Sicily. The IOM stated that traffickers taking people to Italy tended to use less seaworthy vessels, leading to a higher death toll.

Late last month, EU leaders failed to agree on how to relocate the migrants among member states over the next two years, with several countries rejecting their assigned quotas or offering only limited support. German authorities face a backlog of 250,000 asylum bids amid an unprecedented influx of migrants that could reach nearly 500,000 over the course of 2015, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) reported late Monday.

"That number sounds enormous, and in fact it is enormous," BAMF President Manfred Schmidt told the dpa news agency during a visit to a home for asylum applicants in the southern German town of Ellwangen.

German authorities have resorted to tent cities to house asylum applicants, many of whom come from countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo and Serbia. Right-wing violence against migrants and attacks on their accommodations have become a regular occurrence, with 202 incidents recorded in the first half of 2015. The state of Saxony recently announced plans to speed up deportations of applicants assumed to have a low chance of receiving asylum.

A recent poster campaign by the anti-migrant Sweden Democrats at a subway station in Stockholm has stirred outrage. Referring mostly to Roma, the posters plastered above the escalators at Ostermalmstorg apologize to tourists visiting the Swedish capital for "the mess" in Sweden, saying the country has a problem with "forced begging" organized by "international gangs."

In Britain, where some have openly called for the deployment of the military to prevent migrants from entering from French the port of Calais, the government has begun to require landlords to evict people not in the country legally.

mkg/cmk (Reuters, AFP, dpa, AP)