German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, seeking to reduce the number of asylum seekers and stem support for the far-right, agreed a tougher migration policy and new funding for refugee aid with the heads of Germany’s 16 states early Tuesday, Reuters reports.
Scholz’s government has agreed measures to make it easier to deport migrants and make the country less attractive to migrants. The European Union is seeking to overhaul asylum and migration rules to reduce irregular migration, with member states scrambling to strike their own deals. Rome announced on Monday that it would build centres in Albania to receive sea migrants trying to reach Italy.
The meeting in Berlin was aimed at garnering state leaders’ support for such moves and addressing local authorities’ complaints that public coffers and infrastructure are overburdened. Scholz said:
“Our shared goal is to push back irregular migration.”
The federal government has also agreed to explore the possibility of an asylum procedure outside the European Union, but Scholz expressed scepticism about whether countries would agree to it and whether it was constitutionally possible.
The EU has previously tried to set up such centres in North Africa after the 2015 migration crisis, but those attempts were unsuccessful: they were hampered by legal, security and humanitarian concerns. However, the idea has been revived in Europe, first by the UK with its 2022 agreement on Rwanda, and on Monday by Rome.
Concerns about irregular migration in Germany have been heightened by a rise in asylum requests caused by the one million Ukrainian refugees who have arrived in the country since the war in Ukraine began last February.
Some 230,000 people sought asylum in Germany in the first nine months of 2023, more than in the whole of 2022, although far fewer than in 2016-17.
