>> Illustration photo – German Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (pictured on November 17, 2022).
Berlin – German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser would like to better redistribute war refugees from Ukraine among other European states. She announced this today after the intra-German conference on migration, to which she invited the representatives of the German federal states. The minister also wants to better control migrants who are heading to Germany from other crisis regions. One of the routes goes through the Czech Republic, so Germany has intensified random checks on the border with the Czech Republic, which Faeserová reminded today.
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“I am particularly advocating for a stronger redistribution of people fleeing Ukraine. That Poland accepted more than 1.5 million people, we more than one million and other larger EU states, such as Spain, only 100,000, it cannot remain like this,” she said Faeser. She noted that refugees from Ukraine pose a major challenge. “Eight out of ten migrants last year were from Ukraine,” she said. She attributed the responsibility to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “It caused the biggest wave of refugees in Europe since the end of World War II,” she said.
The Federal Statistical Office announced today, based on preliminary calculations, that 1.1 million Ukrainians came to Germany last year. Although about 139,000 Ukrainians returned to their homeland during the year, even so, migration from Ukraine in 2022 surpassed the crisis years of 2014 to 2016, when 834,000 people came to Germany from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Faeser said that the federal government has financially supported German regions that take care of refugees from the beginning and will continue to do so. “Last year it was 3.5 billion euros (83 billion CZK) and for this year we approved 2.75 billion euros (65 billion CZK),” she said. However, federal states and municipalities complain that they still have problems with providing housing for refugees. Faeserová promised to solve this problem with the help of the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Housing Construction and the office managing federal real estate. For the time being, it has offered the regions around 70,000 accommodation places.
The topic of today's conference was also increased migration from other countries, including from Middle Eastern countries. Faeserová said that Chancellor Olaf Scholz agreed with other statesmen at the European Union summit to strengthen the protection of the EU's external borders. At the same time, Germany also guards its borders better. “We extended checks at the border with Austria and intensified random checks at the border with the Czech Republic. We agreed with Switzerland on joint checks on trains and at the border. We will also strengthen efforts to consistently deport rejected asylum seekers,” she said.
Last year, the German police recorded the most cases of illegal border crossings in the last six years. There were 91,986 of them, compared to 57,637 the year before. In 2021, however, restrictions introduced due to the covid-19 pandemic had an effect on migration.
