A record number of people trying to flee into Switzerland were sent back to Italy in July, Finance Minister Ueli Maurer has told Swiss public television, SRF. Maurer, whose responsibilities include oversight of the Swiss Border Guard, attributed the crackdown to a closer working relationship with Italian authorities since his visit to Rome earlier this month, when the two nations agreed to put beefed-up patrols and a “crisis team” along their common border. Until then, the Swiss border presence had been twice that of the Italians. With the agreement, Maurer indicated that he hoped the border guards would be able to react much more quickly to the rising numbers of would-be immigrants at the Swiss border. Asylum requests Europe’s overwhelming influx of more than one million migrants in 2015, most of them coming from war-torn countries such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, has resulted in a huge wave of asylum requests in the European Union. The top destinations ...
