Germany’s refugee estimates skyrocket
EU’s biggest economy expects 800,000 migrants in 2015, four times more than 2014
Germany may receive as many as 800,000 people fleeing war and poverty this year, about quadruple last year’s number, as Europe’s refugee crisis forces policy-makers to shift attention from Greece’s debt woes.
With Syria and the Balkans accounting for most of the increase, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government on Wednesday almost doubled its estimate of the inflow of asylum seekers and refugees compared with projections in May. All European Union countries need to help stem the crisis, said Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, who presented the numbers.
“We have to accept this challenge and master it together,” de Maiziere told reporters in Berlin. “We have to be prepared for high refugee numbers for several years.”
While processing will be sped up, “every refugee coming to Germany must be received and housed in a dignified, safe and decent way,” he said.
Absorbing the surge of foreigners is moving toward the top of Merkel’s agenda after euro-area governments crafted a third bailout for Greece, the Mediterranean nation where many refugees arrive. Settling refugees from war-torn areas is the “next great European project, where we need to show if we’re in a position to act together,” Merkel said in a German television interview Sunday.
Almost 340,000 migrants tried to enter the European Union in July compared to 123,500 a year earlier, the EU border- management agency Frontex said Tuesday.
The biggest number was reported in the Aegean Sea, mainly on the Greek islands of Lesbos, Chios, Samos and Kos.
Germany, Europe’s biggest economy with about 16 per cent of the EU’s population, can’t take in 40 per cent of asylum seekers arriving in the 28nation bloc indefinitely, de Maiziere said.
“Europe, too, will play a central role in the search for solutions,” he said. “We won’t let our partners or the European Commission evade responsibility.”
Strains over how to house, feed and integrate the rush of refugees and asylum seekers to Germany has been building.
As attacks on refugee quarters in Germany multiply, municipalities are demanding more federal aid for refugee housing, schooling and amenities.
Merkel has condemned the attacks. Germany won’t be overwhelmed, “but can’t continue in ‘normal mode,’ ” she said in the ZDF interview.
In Geneva, the UN refugee chief, Antonio Guterres, said that Germany’s outsized role in taking in migrants was “very probably unsustainable” and called for a broader response from the European Union. He said the situation pointed to “obvious dysfunction of the European asylum system.”