Austria demands 600M euros from EU to cover costs of refugees

Austria's Finance Minister Hans-Joerg Schelling has asked the European Commission to provide 600 million euros ($670 million) to cover the costs of taking in additional refugees, a ministry spokesman said on Saturday.

Austria budgeted for 35,000 asylum seekers annually at a cost of 11,000 euros per person but took in some 90,000 people in 2015, the spokesman quoted the minister as saying in a letter to the head of the EU executive, Jean-Claude Juncker.

Austria and neighbouring Germany threw open their borders last year to hundreds of thousands of people pouring into Europe, many of them fleeing conflicts in Syria and elsewhere.

Despite an initial outpouring of sympathy for the migrants, public concern about the influx has fuelled a rise in support for the far right in Austria. Last week Vienna said it would step up deportations of migrants to countries it deems safe. Compared to Syria's neighboring countries, the U.N. refugee agency encouraged European countries to do more to share the burden of the international community in the migrant crisis. Turkey is the country hosting the most refugees in the world with more than two million refugees in the country. Jordan hosts more than 630,000 Syrian refugees while Lebanon hosts more than one million.