Northern Europe Beckons to Desperate Syrians
Thousands of Middle-Class Syrians Are Trying to Get to Europe’s Northern Countries to Seek Asylum
It took Mohamad Simo eight months, $15,000 and five forged passports to get from war-torn Aleppo, Syria, to the sleepy town of Vetlanda in the Swedish countryside.
Now the software engineer has refugee status and access to one of Europe’s most generous welfare systems. He lives in comfortable state housing, studies Swedish on the government’s tab and dreams of opening a chain of coffee shops.
More than a thousand miles to the south, Fares Ayyub is spending his nights with other refugees in a bus station in Sofia, Bulgaria. He, too, was trying to reach Northern Europe. But the civil engineer says he was swindled by smugglers in Turkey, then arrested by Bulgarian police and deposited for months in a detention center in a border town. He is stuck in the European Union’s poorest country, unable to work legally.
As the number of refugees fleeing Syria’s civil war tops two million, the humanitarian crisis is spilling into Europe. Tens of thousands of middle-class Syrians with enough money to pay for transportation and smugglers are trying to get to the continent’s wealthy northern states, lured by lenient refugee policies and the prospect of favorable living conditions.
▻http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303482504579180021524585990?mod=WSJEurope_hpp_LEFTTopSto
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