Austria Refuses to Deport Syrians: “Who would clean hospitals then?”
25th June 2026
With the fall of the Assad regime and the end of the Syrian civil war in December 2024, Syrian refugees have lost their legal basis for asylum and, therefore, their formal right to stay in Europe. In practice, however, most European countries have still not begun deporting them, and many of them don’t even want to.
Among them is Austria, where Interior Minister Gerhard Karner (ÖVP/EPP) recently declared that large-scale remigration—a consistent demand of the national conservative FPÖ (PfE), Austria’s largest party—is unrealistic.
According to Karner, returning Austria’s 100,000-strong Syrian migrant community “is neither realistic nor reasonable, because I wonder how many hospitals would still be cleaned.”
Of course, this age-old argument about migrant labor is not only condescending to foreigners but can also be easily defeated by official statistics: only about 25% of Syrian refugees in Austria are employed, with full-time employment estimated to be as low as 15%.