Living in the Shadows: Navigating Austria's Evolving Asylum Policy

Vienna—Hans Jörg Ulreich grew up in rural Austria near the Hungarian border, far from Vienna. The son of a farmer, Ulreich left for university to pursue a degree in economics while his brother took over the family business. After getting his master's degree in business administration, Ulreich worked at Vienna's Bawag Bank for a month before switching to property development at a small firm called Lenikus. He worked there for seven years before striking out on his own in 1999.

Today, Ulreich's company has 30 properties throughout Vienna, and Ulreich is one of the city's most successful entrepreneurs. He should, given his resume, align himself with the Freedom Party of Austria [FPÖ], the country's far right, anti-immigrant party. Or, at least, he's a fine candidate for involvement in the center right Austrian People's Party [ÖVP]. Instead, Ulreich has become the face of the movement defending Austria's tens of thousands of asylum seekers. He has lent his name to their cause and, even more surprisingly, he has put his business interests on the line. In September, Ulreich held a press conference announcing that one of the apartment buildings his company was renovating would become a safe haven for families about to be deported because their asylum claims had been denied. Ulreich publicly stated that Austria's president should be ashamed and all but challenged the authorities to call his bluff and deport his building's tenants.

In a city where society revolves around the lavish Opera Ball, where history, tradition and—most importantly—authority reign supreme amid the cream of European wealth, this former farm boy from Eastern Austria is standing up to defend the country's immigrants. Many are asking, why? But the real question is how did Austria come to the point where such a question was necessary?

A Historical Refuge

"The granting of asylum has always been a holy duty for us, which we have honestly fulfilled in spite of all sacrifices," Julius Raab, Austria's Federal Chancellor and member of the övp, said in 1959, at the founding of the Austrian committee for the year of refugees. While Austria is now at the center of a rightward shift in Europe's asylum and immigration policy, this wasn't always the case. After the Second World War, the country's borders with Hungary and Czechoslovakia comprised 495 miles of the Iron Curtain. Austria accepted hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers from Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. "Somebody was a hero [if they] tried to leave their country and come to Austria," says Gerhard Muzak, an expert in asylum law and professor at the University of Vienna.

Since then, much has changed in central and eastern Austria. The wall between East and West came down. The Cold War was shuffled into the dustbin of history. And, fast forward two decades, this year's hotly contested elections in Vienna featured a campaign slogan from the FPö that includes the phrase, "More Courage for our Viennese Blood!" Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache later explained that the slogan referred to a famous waltz, and was celebrating Vienna's multicultural history rather than reliving the era in which hundreds of thousands of Austrians lined the roads to welcome the troops of the Third Reich during the Anschluss. While Austrians have long been proud of their historic role as a destination for those fleeing oppression, the truth (much like the nation's role during World War II) is far more complex.

In 1946, a decade before Chancellor Raab declared Austria's holy duty to be a sanctuary, Felix Stika of the center left Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), said Austrians "must care and spend horrendous amounts of money for these criminals' camps... These persons should be repatriated or deported, because they only cause us trouble." Oskar Helmer, a member of the slightly more moderate spö, took a more tactful approach, observing that "although it's an honor to be seen as a country where notions of humanity haven't died, we must appeal to the whole...