Berlin.
Nancy Faeser, the country heads and districts meet to better control migration. One thing is clear: there are no quick fixes.
It is these reports that increase the pressure on Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD): The city of Worms wants to accommodate refugees in a school gym. The mayor of Ebersberg in Bavaria refuses to take in more people.
In the Franconian town of Heigenbrücken, residents are protesting against the establishment of asylum accommodation. They are scenes from an unsettled country. Scenes that bring back memories of 2015 – when Germany couldn’t cope with the influx of refugees, especially from Syria, for a short time.
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On Thursday, Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) sat on the podium in her ministry and spoke first of all about the “great effort” and the “commitment of the municipalities” in the accommodation. It takes a while before Faeser repeats what the federal government is already doing in terms of asylum policy.
Provide 70,000 places for refugees with federal properties, the federal government continues to identify vacancies that can be used for accommodation. The EU has campaigned for stronger external border protection and detention pending deportation has been extended from three to six months. And: The federal government pays the states a lot of money, 3.5 billion euros last year. 2.7 billion again this year.
Lack of living space, lack of volunteers
A few seats next to Faeser is Reinhard Sager, President of the District Council. He gets reports like the ones above from Worms or Heigenbrücken. And Sager is disappointed after the summit. No more billions from the federal government for the counties. “The pressure is considerable”. The federal states and municipalities would have to take care of and accommodate them, while the number of asylum seekers in Germany continues to rise. Not fast, but steady.
Sager emphasizes that the living space is so massively limited as rarely before. This not only applies to refugees, but the situation is tense anyway. But there is also a lack of volunteers in the communities that are involved in the asylum accommodation. The federal government announced that it would assume the costs of preparing the federal properties. So far, the municipalities have borne the conversion costs.
The situation is comparable to 2015 – and yet not the same. More than a million people from Ukraine have registered in Germany. Some have moved on, others have returned despite the war. Anyone who flees Ukraine and stays in Germany does not have to go through the complex asylum procedure. That eases the situation for the authorities.
Large cities such as Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Leipzig report capacities at the limit. In Bavaria and Saarland, the capacity for accommodating refugees is 90 percent occupied. However, the situation in other federal states is not yet so dramatic. Hesse, Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia have occupied around half of the places in the asylum centers.
Nationwide, there are no figures on the capacity for admission
After the summit in Berlin, Faeser announced that one year after the start of the Ukraine war, exchanges between the federal, state and local governments should be improved. With the help of a digital “dashboard” that is intended to collect information from the asylum authorities and immigration authorities. Everyone should have access to the data. This is intended to better control the distribution of newly arriving refugees among the federal states and municipalities. The digital tool should be ready for use at the end of February.
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It has also become clear that many municipalities are complaining that the accommodation capacities are at the limit – but nobody knows exactly how many people there are currently still free accommodation spaces for in Germany. When asked, Hamburg’s Interior Senator Andy Grote (SPD), who is sitting next to Faeser on the podium, explained that this is difficult to measure “on a daily basis” for a large city like Hamburg alone. Nationwide there are no figures on reception capacities.
The federal and state governments are in a dilemma: With the corona pandemic, the number of people moving in has fallen drastically, accommodation for refugees has been reduced. Now the number of asylum seekers is increasing rapidly. According to information from our editorial team, experts in the federal government do not expect the number of people seeking protection to fall in the coming months.
The war in Ukraine alone drove more than a million people to Germany. In recent years, however, too little has been said about reception capacities. And now they have to be improvised again in the federal and state governments and stamped out of the ground.
Migration agreements with states like Afghanistan and Syria are unthinkable
Just like the Union in the opposition, the countries are pushing for stronger border protection and more deportations. A few weeks ago, Interior Minister Faeser appointed FDP politician Joachim Stamp as the new “special representative” for migration. He wants to forge agreements with countries of origin to which more deportations are then to be made, such as Iraq.
Stamp wants to negotiate with the major countries of origin on behalf of the federal government. The idea: States such as Iraq or Morocco accept people who are obliged to leave the country faster and in larger numbers – and in return receive incentives, money or visa facilitation for students from the country, for example.
Stamp himself has noticed that this project of bilateral agreements is going to be tedious. After the “summit” in Berlin, he says it would take “a considerable amount of time”. And in any case, negotiations with the two largest countries of origin are out of the question: Syria and Afghanistan. “Try to forge a migration agreement with the Taliban,” says Stamp. He had no idea how that was supposed to work.
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