Swiss to cut staff caring for underage asylum-seekers

Children's books in a meeting place for asylum-seekers and refugees in Bern Keystone / Peter Klaunzer

The State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) is reducing its support staff for unaccompanied minor asylum-seekers. It will cut 120 full-time positions at national level.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

The SEM confirmed a report by the newspaper ArcInfo on Saturday. The reason given for the reduction is the decline in the number of young asylum-seekers arriving in Switzerland.

“As we are looking after fewer asylum-seekers than expected, we will need fewer counselling staff in the coming months and are considering closing some locations,” SEM spokeswoman Magdalena Rast told the Swiss News Agency Keystone-SDA.

+ Migration commission calls for special status for child asylum-seekers

The number of unaccompanied minors in the various federal asylum centres has fallen from 1,500 in September 2023 to 600 today. The decision does not affect the specially trained educators and social pedagogues.

Translated from German by DeepL/ts

How we work

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, if you want to learn more about how we use technology, click here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to [e-mail].