German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said the country may see an influx of 1 million refugees this year, more than previously estimated, as housing capacity for migrants becomes “nearly exhausted.”
“There is much to indicate that we’ll take on not 800,000 refugees this year, as the Interior Ministry has forecast, but one million,” Gabriel said in a letter to his Social Democratic party members on Monday. State leaders have indicated that housing capacity for refugees is “nearly exhausted.”
So, it might be a million now. Well done, Chancellor Merkel!
Bloomberg:
Germany’s decision to re-introduce border controls is temporary and sends a signal to other European Union member states that Germany “can’t take on refugees by itself.” Some EU states “openly reject” a joint resolution of the crisis.
“Without a joint European effort however, a resolution of the refugee crisis won’t work,” Gabriel said in the letter, which was posted on the SPD website.
And what a ‘joint European effort means’ is (typically) compulsion.
French EU affairs minister, Harlem Desir, said in Brussels Monday “all 28″ EU states “must” agree to an “obligatory and permanent” scheme to redistribute migrants, referring to opposition from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. He said it’s “unacceptable” that France, Germany, and Sweden take “90%” of asylum seekers.
On Sunday [Austrian Chancellor] Faymann suggested that if no consensus was reached in Brussels, Germany and its allies could try to force through a vote on quotas with a qualified majority.
There’s a certain irony in the fact that Faymann, the Austrian who disgustingly compared Hungary’s treatment of some of the migrant inflow “to Nazi deportations during the Holocaust”, is now prepared to argue that Eastern European borders should be ignored.
It’s obvious that this crisis cannot be blamed on Merkel alone (far from it). The root causes—it should not need saying— lie in the migrants’ countries of origin. Nevertheless, the surge of people in the EU’s direction this year, not to speak of its most recent intensification, owes a great deal to clear signals sent by Germany’s lax immigration policies in the last year or so. And now, of course, there is the impact of Angela Merkel’s irresponsible comments of a few days back, comments that were made without regard to the views of Germany’s EU ‘partners’, partners who are now supposed to bail Germany out. A politician with more sense of honor would at least be considering resignation after a blunder on this scale, but Merkel, well….
Writing in the Orange County Register, Joel Kotkin:
Europe seems to lack the will to close a door opened once Germany decided to embrace endless migration. Germany, which may take 800,000 refugees this year, recently suggested it could accept an additional 500,000 annually for the next several years. In the process, the cultural life of the continent likely becomes more “multicultural” and global, and ever less European. Its lodestar is no longer its own past or its common European dream, but a future determined by affairs elsewhere, and by people who, in many cases, are largely indifferent toward the continent’s historical legacy – including some who wish to demolish it.
Ironically, it was German Chancellor Angela Merkel who proclaimed five years ago that “multiculturalism had utterly failed” in her country. Merkel now has become the chief enabler of a massive shift in population that can only – given the weakness of Europe’s own culture – be essentially merged with, and even undermined by, that of the Islamic world.
Kotkin’s last paragraph may still be an overstatement (and I don’t agree with quite a bit of what he says elsewhere in the piece, which also–no fault of Kotkin–is accompanied by an illustration that is, to say the least, tasteless), but there is no reason why the rest of the EU should be compelled to underwrite Merkel’s folly. If she can find a coalition of the willing to help her out, fine, but if not, this must be Germany’s burden and Germany’s alone.
And now the EU’s smaller, poorer countries, particularly to the east, have had a brutal demonstration of how little Brussels, Paris and Berlin care about their hard-won self-determination, they should, as a bloc, reinstate the routine border controls (and reinstating border controls is not the same as closing the borders) that, until recently were a badge of the sovereignty of any independent nation. Legally, that’s not straightforward, thanks to the Schengen arrangements, but, as we saw during the euro zone crisis, EU law can prove remarkably flexible on occasion.
The countries of Eastern Europe and others such as Denmark (which is declining to participate in any pan-EU quota scheme) should make sure that now is one of those occasions.