Buckling under the weight of their own poor decisions, Germany is now considering how to limit the number of migrants coming to their borders every year, and the interior minister has now admitted “we can’t take every refugee”.
Christian Democrat minister Thomas de Maiziere has become the latest senior figure to buck the German mainstream political consensus, when he admitted there may actually be a limit to the number of migrants European countries could take. Speaking in an interview with news magazine Der Spiegel, de Maiziere said “We cannot accept all the people who are fleeing conflict zones or poverty and want to come to Europe or Germany” on Saturday.
Instead of welcoming asylum seekers-turned-economic migrants, crossing the borders into Europe illegally, de Maiziere suggested legal routes of ingress to the European Union should be created, with precise accounting of arrivals and strict quotas. Any excess would be exported.
Although he appears to be hardening towards the migrant crisis question, saying that many should be sent back either to their home countries, or to another in the region close to home where they can wait for the situation to resolve, he told the magazine opening the German border was not a mistake. “The decision was necessary for humanitarian reasons in exceptional circumstances. Had we not, the same amount would have come, only later” he said.
His insistence that the number of migrants coming to Germany from Syria – or at least claiming to be from Syria – isn’t effected by German government policy belies the potential pull-factor of declaring the nation open to all-comers.
German authorities revealed last week that after the government gave a carte blanche to Syrian migrants, almost all people arriving at the national borders suddenly started claiming to be Syrian. Minister of the Interior of the German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lorenz Caffier said “At least a quarter of those refugees allegedly coming from Syria are not from Syria, but from other Arab or African countries”.
Rainer Wendt, head of the German Police Union said: “Almost without exception, every refugee pretends to be a Syrian when in fact, many come from other countries, even from sub-Saharan Africa”, Breitbart London reported.