The Belgium government has told prospective irregular migrants to Europe to bury the dream as there is no more Golden Fleece in Europe.
Speaking to journalists in Abuja on Friday, Director General, Office of Foreigners, Belgium, Mr. Freddy Roosemont, said right now there are no space for people to migrate to in his country, noting that a lot of irregular migrants end up on the streets.
He therefore stressed that most dreams of a better life in Europe are just fake as it is not easy to survive in Europe, insisting that the economic meltdown is a global phenomenon.
He said: “First of all, informing the people correctly, because that they often leave with a dream. If I say to the investor, you’re gonna win the lottery next week and it’s going to bring you a million euros and he believes me it will be a dream, is that dream realistic? Not at all.
“So first of all, you have to take away the dream. The dream is not real. That’s why I’m telling you and I hope that through you, the public is aware that that dream is not real.
“ It’s not easy to survive in Europe, without a decent job and without sort of being an employer or by a university. The dream is fake.
He said the number of regular migrants allowed are limited, strict and restricted, noting that it is only for “a limited number of people who goes to have gone through a number of conditions. Somebody who wants to study in Belgium is very welcome. But he first has to show to the university that he will be capable to follow the studies there in English, that if he’s studying medicine, that he has a sort of basics to study medicine, if he wants to become engineering, that he has a technical knowledge that he is good in maths and so on. So there it’s the division University is going to select who they want, it would not be only from Nigeria, it’s from everywhere in the world like that.
“The work is possibilities are there, but it will be Belgium employer who is looking for somebody who can fill in a position in his company, and he has connections, he knows that you’re capable to do so that he asks at the Belgium service of labour, if he can contact you give you a contract and get you over. family reunification is easy to do.
“So you need a family you need a wife and your children. But that those three are the three main levels of legal migration.”
He also warned that coming to Belgium with the intention to seek asylum would not also work, as there is low chances of obtaining a residence permit.
“So at that moment, we have to limit the reception of asylum seekers only to people who are vulnerable and that means families, women with children. No man alone, not in that group.
“So for the moment there are lots of this asylum seekers living in Brussels on the street, and I can assure you the temperature in Brussels is not what it is here in Abuja. It got to minus seven, minus five. Now it’s around zero Celsius.
“So it’s really not easy to survive in Brussels without help without an assistance.
“We are by law obliged to give that assistance but we simply can’t do it because places are filled up or simply filled up. It’s a very painful situation for Belgium, but it’s like that if you look at the newspapers, if you look at the journals, if you walk in the streets in Brussels, you’re going to see everywhere, people sleeping on the streets and people trying to survive with out any help.
“Secondly, we also see that a lot of people, especially girls are forced into prostitution in the big cities.
“If we find girls like that, we try to help them we try to help them to come to come them the people come keep guilty of that.”
He also added that there are certain procedures in the Belgium Justice Department that also would help girls who want to leave the profession. So we get quite good information about what they have to do and what they earn. And they earn nothing, their passport will be taking away from them. Their humanity will be taken away from them and they will end up in there and that’s why you have to inform your public, the people of Nigeria, the youth of Nigeria that things like that are still going on in Europe and in Belgium.
Roosemont pleaded with the media to help educate the people, saying: “Notify the youth that it’s not the dream to go to Europe to go to Belgium is not realistic and it’s very dangerous. So that’s why I making that brief. That’s also the reason why we were here in Nigeria the last week to try to inform the the youth directly or indirectly, that the thing that they hope is not a realistic thing. It’s a very dangerous thing.”
