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Norway Offers Even BIGGER Bonus To Encourage Refugees To Return Home

REUTERS/Darrin Zammit Lupi.

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Jonah Bennett Contributor
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The government of Norway is stepping up its previous effort to encourage refugees to return to their home countries by offering them an extra bonus of roughly $1,200.

Norway already gives refugees who want to return home about $2,400 to do so. The newly announced bonus of $1,200 is in addition to that base figure, The Local reports.

The hope of such a plan, which runs for about six weeks and only applies to the first 500 asylum seekers who sign up, is to incentivize refugees to leave the country voluntarily. It applies to refugees who have entered Norway before April 1 and who have not overstayed their limits.

The program targets refugees who are unlikely to have successful claims to remain in Norway. If the government doesn’t find a way to get them out of the country now, they will likely impose a much greater cost later. Government workers are trying to get word out about the program through spreading fliers across 31 different municipalities.

According to Integration Minister Sylvi Listhaug, the proposal would save the government an extraordinary amount of money, since operating asylum centers is a huge fiscal burden.

“We need to entice more to voluntarily travel back by giving them a bit more money on their way out. This will save us a lot of money because it is expensive to have people in the asylum centres,” Integration Minister Sylvi Listhaug told broadcaster NRK, according to The Local.

Earlier this year, Listhaug blasted France and Belgium for allowing the creation of immigrant ghettos, which according to her resulted in the terror attacks in Paris and Brussels.

“Therefore a tight immigration policy is important,” Listhaug said in March.

Listhaug has previously emphasized the need to not be like Sweden, with its overly generous policies for migrants, which often results in completely separate and segregated communities, among other socioeconomic problems.

“It is obvious that we do have problems, one needs only look at the social statistics,” Listhaug said.

“We have foreign fighters who have left Norway and radical environments. We should not stick our heads in the sand and say that everything is good here. But fortunately we are a long way from the conditions we see in some other countries, for example Sweden,” Listhaug added.

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