More than 8,000 migrants granted refugee status in European Union member-states made a second “inadmissible” asylum application to Germany last year.
Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) confirmed that in 2017, 8,210 recognised refugees attempted to hedge their bets and made the second application – nearly tripling from 2,997 the year before, reports Die Welt.
Though such applications are considered “inadmissible” as the migrants have been granted asylum in another EU nation, only a fraction was returned to the EU country responsible for them, with that figure being, at most, 1,428.
Refugees can also sue to prevent deportation, with the presiding judge at the administrative court of Berlin, Christian Gau, telling the newspaper that there are “a large number of decisions made by the administrative courts to deport beneficiaries to Italy and other EU countries that have been prevented, especially where the refugee is sick or a single parent”.
Referring to it as “asylum shopping”, Mr. Gau said that it is “a matter of course that in other states recognised persons entitled to protection who are illegally residing in the Federal territory must be returned to their host country.
“That’s because preventing so-called asylum shopping is one of the goals of the Common European Asylum System,” he said, admitting: “But the reality looks different.”
The problem of “asylum shopping” was a noted phenomenon beginning almost immediately after the migrant crisis, where German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the gates of Europe to more than one million third world citizens, with most migrants heading towards richer northern EU states with generous welfare systems.
Breitbart London reported that some migrants felt so aggrieved and “deceived” about being hosted by less economically developed member states, one Iraqi family resettled in Lithuania planned to file a complaint with the UN for not being sent to Germany or Sweden instead.
Deportations of failed asylum seekers from Germany to their countries of origin had fallen in 2017, despite Merkel’s pledges less than a year earlier to ramp up deportations – the endeavour finding support least of all in left-wing regional governments such as Berlin which refuses to deport some migrants.
The leader of the Christian Social Union (CSU) Horst Seehofer, the sister-party to Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), warned that the deportation of the estimated 250,000 failed asylum seekers from Germany is unrealistic.
“The question of deportation is a great illusion in Germany. It is almost impossible to send back the migrants once they are in the country,” Mr. Seehofer said.
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