Lithuania should reconsider its immigration policy by focusing more on “culturally closer” countries, Prime Minister Gintautas Paluckas said on Monday.
"Unfortunately, we probably need to acknowledge that people coming from certain countries are more prone to radicalisation,” he told reporters after meeting President Gitanas Nausėda.
“There’s apparently a need to reconsider our immigration policy in the sense that we should actively look for qualified labour in countries that are culturally closer to us,” he added, without naming specific countries.
His comments came after Lithuania’s outgoing intelligence chief, Darius Jauniškis, said ten people from undisclosed Central Asian countries had been denied entry to Lithuania over links to terrorist organisations and potential radicalisation.
Paluckas said Lithuania planned to review its migration policy to ensure that visa issuance better reflects “parameters of cultural closeness”.
“Today we have many external visa or document processing centres that don’t necessarily match these parameters of cultural closeness. So we are definitely looking ahead and planning to revise our migration policy,” the prime minister said.
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