Austria's Vice Chancellor says Austria cannot accept much more than the roughly 100,000 asylum seekers it expects to receive this year, following a pledge from its larger neighbour Germany to limit arrival numbers.
Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East, Afghanistan and elsewhere, have entered Austria on their route northwest from the Balkans since early September.
Most have moved on to Germany, but Austria still expects to have received about 95,000 asylum applications this year, equivalent to more than one per cent of its population, compared with the 28,000 registered in 2014. Of those, 38 per cent were approved.
"Around 90-100,000 - a lot more will simply not be possible," Reinhold Mitterlehner, from the conservative OVP, junior partner in the coalition, told ORF radio on Monday, pointing to bottlenecks in available accommodation for asylum seekers.
"That's not the sum which comes in addition every year," he told reporters on Monday. "Those who leave, who get integrated...those who return to their countries - that's roughly the room for maneouvre which we have for the next few years."
Chancellor Werner Faymann, a Social Democrat who has generally adopted a more compassionate tone on the issue than the conservatives, was quoted as saying on Saturday that Austria should step up deportations of migrants who do not qualify for asylum.
Faymann has also emphasised that policy decisions have been closely coordinated with his German counterpart Angela Merkel, who has pledged to "noticeably reduce the number of refugees", fending off a challenge from critics of her own.
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