Some updates on the Germany refugee/migrant inflow crisis

Last updated on: August 14, 2016 at 12:44 pm by Jane the Actuary

Some updates on the Germany refugee/migrant inflow crisis 2016-08-14T12:44:35-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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By Rebecca Harms from Wendland, Germany (Ungarn September 2015) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

It is really, really difficult to keep up with what’s going on, as refugee/migrants continue to flood into Germany. But:

1) In yesterday’s spiegel.de, “Fehlende Notunterkünfte: München rechnet mit bis zu 13.000 Flüchtlingen“, or “Insufficient emergency housing: Munich expects up to 13,000 refugees” — that is, at the time of the article’s writing, 13,000 refugees were expected to have arrived in Munich in a single day. The city is overwhelmed, and the article speaks of using a stadium as temporary housing, and then setting up a tent city.

2) Today, the Telegraph reported on developing events (via instapundit.com), including a retreat from the temporary policy of allowing asylum-seekers to come directly to Germany, and a further temporary return to border controls. The article quotes Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere at a press conference:

Bild newspaper cited security sources as saying that the state government in Bavaria had asked the federal police to help deal with the task. The newspaper said the federal police would send 2,100 officers to Bavaria to help it secure its borders.

Mr de Maiziere warned today that refugees streaming into Europe cannot choose which country they want to settle in, as tens of thousands surged through the continent in search of shelter.

“We can’t allow refugees to freely choose where they want to stay – that’s not the case anywhere in the world,” de Maiziere said.

“It also can’t be our duty to pay benefits laid out in German law to refugees who have been allocated to one EU country and then come to Germany anyway,” he added.

They also quote the Polish secretary of state for European affairs, Rafal Trzaskowski:

“If certain conditions are met, we are willing to show more solidarity than so far,” he was quoted as saying by tvn24.pl website. “What are the conditions?”

“We have to firmly secure EU’s external borders, we have to clearly distinguish economic migrants, accepting whom we cannot afford, from refugees that one needs to help, because they are fleeing death or persecution,” he said.

Trzaskowski said the third condition was that the Polish government had influence over the verification of those accepted from the point of view of security threats.

3) And speaking of security threats and economic migrants, here’s a report from a conservative news site, Top Right News:

An ISIS terrorist posing as an “asylum seeker” has been arrested by German police in a “refugee” center in Stuttgart, and German customs officers have seized boxes containing 10,000 Syrian passports being smuggled into Europe — possibly to be utilized by ISIS cell members to blend into German society.

Now, I ordinarily don’t cite this as an appropriate news source, but they cite two German news sources, RTL for the arrest of the “asylum seeker” and tagesspiegel.de for the smuggling of Syrian passports , which, whether stolen or falsified, are highly-sought after for both actual Syrian refugees in Turkey who have lost, or never had, a passport, and for non-Syrians (Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, and migrants from Macedonia & Serbia) who aim to pass themselves off as Syrians.

4) And speaking of economic migrants, here’s a report by the AP (which appeared in Friday’s Tribune): “For Savvy Migrants, Social Media Helps Ease Trip to the West.” The article is about how migrants use facebook pages and other sources to make connections with smugglers and plan their route, which is not a surprise, but take a look at who they profile in the story:

The 26-year-old Syrian economics graduate knew exactly what to do and where to go. . . .

“I have researched our journey for more than two months,” said Zaidah, a native of the Syrian city of Aleppo who has worked the past two years as an accountant in Istanbul.

So, yes, maybe this is indeed the sort of person that Daimler wants to recruit, but does he deserve admittance into Germany as a refugee, when he left what sounds like a reasonably-stable, not particularly desperate situation in Turkey?

5) Oh, and the Saudis? In a completely tone-deaf move, they’ve offered — not to resettle refugees in their own country, nor to bump up their spending on refugee camps in Turkey, Lebanon, etc. — to fund 200 new mosques in Germany. See The Independent for an English-language account, via twitter, or their source, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which reveals that not only are Saudi Arabia and the UAE not helping, but they’re not even extending residency permits for Syrian guest workers. (Of course, it’s fruitless to condemn the Saudis. Per my earlier post, I would be shocked if this effort to shame the Gulf States into stepping up made a difference. And remember my list of cultural traits? The Saudis and their neighbors are not like us. They do not share our values of helping the needy, at least not when it goes against their own culture, which prioritizes securing the well-being of their own group, first and foremost.

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