Germany is using the recent earthquakes in Turkey and Syria as an excuse to weaken border controls, vowing to allow in many more migrants said to be fleeing the crisis.
Many more prospective migrants from Turkey and Syria will be able to come to Germany with relative ease, the country’s leftist government announced on Saturday.
It is the latest attempt by officials in the European Union member-state to use a crisis to weaken its borders, despite the fact that the European populace as a whole is edging more and more towards the right on the issue of mass migration.
According to a report by Bild am Sonntag, Germany’s allegedly Antifa-linked Interior Minister, Nancy Faeser, has agreed to let in migrants from the two Muslim-majority “unbureaucratically” if they already have family in the country.
Germany already has huge migrant diasporas from both nations, with recent reports indicating that there are more than 400,000 Syrians in Germany and a Turkish diaspora numbered in the millions.
“It’s about help in times of need,” Faeser told the German tabloid publication in an attempt to justify her decision to once again loosen her country’s borders.
“We want to make it possible for Turkish or Syrian families in Germany to bring their close relatives from the disaster region to them unbureaucratically so that they can find shelter with us and receive medical treatment,” she claimed.
To this end, Faeser said that the Federal government was now planning to give these Syrian and Turkish migrants rapid access to three-month visas so they can join family members already in Germany.
Although Germany seems adamant on continuing to take in large swathes of foreign nationals, other nations in Europe now appear to be getting less keen, with much of the EU starting to inch rightwards on the issue of border controls.
Many representatives are now even backing the idea of putting up fences along the union’s borders, with a meeting in Brussels on Friday seeing some national lawmakers voice support for increasing spending on measures aimed at keeping migrants out.
This appeared to horrify Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz, with POLITICO reporting the leftist leader as comparing the plan to put up border fortifications to U.S. President Donald Trump’s unfinished Mexico border wall.
Scholz seems to now hold a minority opinion within the bloc, however, with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen expressing a desire to see the EU tighten restrictions on inward migration.
“Borders must be managed,” von der Leyen declared. “We will act to strengthen our external borders.”
How successful such a clampdown will actually be remains to be seen, with many parts of the Union seeing a massive surge in migrant arrivals in 2022.