Germany tells EU it can’t take any more migrants

Government resources are at a breaking point, Interior Minister Faeser has said

Berlin has no choice but to bolster border controls, as state and federal resources have been “almost exhausted” on refugees and asylum-seekers, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser has reportedly told Brussels.

Earlier this week, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government announced that Germany would begin checking passports along the land border again, for at least six months, without regard to the Schengen agreement.

“No country in the world can accept an unlimited number of refugees,” Faeser said in a letter to the European Commission, which Der Spiegel obtained on Wednesday.

Germany is “increasingly reaching the limits of what is affordable in terms of reception, accommodation and care,” the letter said, noting that federal and state resources are “almost exhausted,” and there is a real risk of “overburdening the common welfare.”

According to the letter, the volume of “irregular entries” into the country is unacceptable and “worrying,” amounting to 50,000 people in the first seven months of 2024.

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Faeser also argued that “threats to public safety and order” demand reimposing the border controls, pointing to “incidents of knife and violent crime by refugees.” Three people were killed and eight wounded last month, in a stabbing spree at a diversity festival in Solingen. The suspect, a 26-year-old Syrian, had reportedly sought asylum in 2022.

Germany, she wrote, was concerned with “the increasing dysfunctionality of the Dublin system,” the EU scheme under which asylum-seekers are supposed to be handled by the country where they first entered. Berlin is now seeking ways to send migrants to countries along the bloc’s outer rim such as Bulgaria, Greece, Italy and Romania, where their claims should have been processed. Most migrants from outside the EU have sought to end up in Germany, due to its generous welfare benefits.

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While Scholz’s “traffic light” coalition does not want to turn all refugees away, citing legal concerns, one of the biggest opposition parties has advocated for just such an approach. It is both legally permissible and “in light of the current situation even politically necessary” to close the border, CDU leader Friedrich Merz said in the Bundestag on Wednesday.

Discussing mass immigration has long been off-limits in Germany, until the state elections in Thuringia and Saxony last week saw major gains by Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) parties, both immigration skeptics. The ruling coalition is facing a tough election in Brandenburg later this month.