Germany will accept 500K refugees a year
Critics question if generous policies entice migrants.
— A top German official said Tuesday that his country could take half a million refugees a year “for several years,” even as some critics questioned whether generous asylum policies are enticing more migrants to make the dangerous trek for Western Europe.
Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel made his pledge amid signs that the migrant flow — many from war-battered Iraq and Syria — is only escalating amid a humanitarian crisis that has sharply tested European cooperation and fundamental policies such as open borders.
A ship crammed with thousands of migrants docked in the Greek port of Piraeus near Athens. Greek authorities, meanwhile, rushed to send help to the island of Lesbos off the Turkish coast, where 20,000 migrants have been growing increasingly frustrated by the long wait in squalid conditions for a ferry to the mainland.
Further up the route traveled by the majority of migrants entering the continent, a record 7,000 Syrians reached the Greek border with Macedonia, the U.N. refugee agency reported Tuesday. Greek television broadcast chaotic scenes as migrants struggled to cross.
And on the border between Hungary and Serbia, migrants slept in an open field after clashing with police the day before. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who ousted his defense minister late Monday over a missed deadline for building a border fence, told the newspaper Magyar Idok that the government would speed up construction.
Gabriel said other European nations needed to do more to address the crisis, even as Britain and France — which had been criticized for not doing enough — pledged to take in tens of thousands of asylum seekers.
Germany — the nation taking in the lion’s share, an estimated 800,000 by year’s end — has continued to lead the way. The government pledged Monday to hire 3,000 more police officers and spend $6.7 billion more to address the crisis, including providing emergency housing for 150,000 people.
Yet even as German Chancellor Angela Merkel said her nation should be “proud” of its response, other European leaders and domestic critics blamed Germany — as well as similarly generous nations such as Sweden — for offering benefits so lucrative that they had become an incentive for asylum seekers to risk their lives over land and sea.
Germany responded to the criticism by announcing a reduction in cash handouts for asylum seekers during their initial months of processing, instead saying it would offer them more food stamps and in-kind aid.
Berlin also said it would push to have western Balkan countries such as Kosovo declared “safe” in a bid to weed out the many thousands of migrants now claiming asylum from countries not at war.
The German maneuvers reflected the complex nature of Europe’s migrant crisis, in which desperate Syrians and Iraqis are searching for sanctuary in the wealthy countries of Europe’s core along with a host of economic migrants pouring in from countries as far-flung as Pakistan and Bangladesh.