Contain your surprise: It’s not strictly a “refugee” crisis after all. Via the Telegraph:
Germany estimates that 30 per cent of incoming migrants claiming to be citizens of war-torn Syria are in fact from other countries, an interior ministry spokesman said Friday.
“It’s an estimate based on the observations of officials on the ground, especially the federal police, the Office for Migration and Refugees and (EU border protection agency) Frontex,” he said. . . . .
A market in fake Syrian passports has sprung up, particularly in Turkey, to help migrants and refugees enter the EU, Fabrice Leggeri, the head of Frontex, said earlier this month.
Of course it has; demand has never been higher. And while Germany’s largesse has surely incentivized this large-scale fraud, a black market in false papers was an inevitable development. Which raises the obvious question: Will the United States be better able to distinguish real, vulnerable refugees from the scores of imposters? Given its “come one, come all” approach to immigration, will the Obama administration even be much concerned to try?
And, this widespread racket aside, Germany is reaping the whirlwind otherwise:
Christian and Muslim refugees should be housed separately in Germany to minimise tensions following growing levels of violence at asylum seeker shelters, a police chief has urged.
Jörg Radek, deputy head of Germany’s police union, said migrants should be divided, following increasing numbers of attacks on Christians in refugee centres.
“I think housing separated according to religion makes perfect sense,” Jörg Radek, deputy head of Germany’s police union, told German newspaper Die Welt, particularly for Muslims and Christians. . . .
The police have reached their absolute breaking point,” said Mr Radek. “Our officials are increasingly being called to confrontations in refugee homes. When there are 4,000 people in a home which only actually has places for 750, this confinement then leads to aggression where even a tiny thing like the corridor to the toilet can lead to violence.”
A sample of said violence:
Two separate clashes erupted between refugees on Sunday at a temporary migrant shelter in Kassel-Calden in northern Germany left 14 people injured, police said.
The first outbreak of violence in the afternoon was triggered by a dispute in the canteen at lunchtime between two groups of around 60 refugees, followed by a second clash in the evening involving a group of 70 migrants against another of 300.
A few days earlier on Thursday evening, a fight broke out among up to 200 Syrian and Afghan refugees at a shelter in Leipzig, with migrants wielding table legs and slats.
America’s refugee commitment — 10,000 this fiscal year, with triple that to follow — is a fraction of Germany’s. But it is naïve to think that we will not import some of the same problems.