The Belgium government has sounded a warning that it is not easy to survive in Belgium, albeit Europe without a decent job.
Belgium also expressed concern over the spike in some asylum seekers from Nigeria in the post-COVID era, saying it has increased from 50 to 380 in 2023.
Freddy Roosemont, Director General, Office of Foreigners, Belgium barked out the warning while addressing journalists in Abuja on Friday.
Roosemont said right now there is no space for people to migrate to in his country, as lots of irregular migrants end up on the streets.
He therefore stressed that most dreams of a better life in Europe are nothing but eldorado; adding that it’s a dream and not a reality.
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 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.
“The second thing is, of course, we have legal migration, but legal migration will not be for 10,000 for 5000 people. It will be for some people who have gone through some 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 of following the studies there in English, that if he’s studying medicine he has a sort of basics to study medicine, and if he wants to become an engineer, 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 let it was not only from Nigeria, it’s from everywhere in the world like that.
“The work possibilities are there, but it will be a Belgium employer who is looking for somebody who can fill a position in his company, and he has connections, he knows that you’re capable of doing 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 those three are the three main levels of legal migration.”
He also warned that coming to Belgium to seek asylum would not work, as there is a low chance 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 these 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 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 without 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 certain procedures in the Belgium Justice Department 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 taken away from them. Their humanity will be taken away from them and they will end up 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 Belgium.
Roosemont pleaded with the media to help educate the people, saying “Notifying 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 youth directly or indirectly, that the thing that they hope is not realistic. It’s a very dangerous thing.”
