Tag Archives: Migrant Crisis

Number of migrants registering in Germany falls markedly in January

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany registered 91,671 migrants in January, less than half November’s level, officials said on Thursday as pressure mounted on Chancellor Angela Merkel to deliver on her pledge to reduce the influx.

Support for Merkel has fallen sharply due to her open-door refugee policy, with a poll on Wednesday showing 81 percent of people think her government does not have the situation under control.

An Interior Ministry statement on the latest migrant tally gave no explanation for the notable drop in migrant arrivals, but it said previously that a downward trend seen since late last year was due mainly to freezing winter weather.

Germany has also reimposed spot controls on border points with Austria used by incoming migrants and is seeking to speed up deportations of those not qualifying for asylum.

Merkel has said the number of migrants entering Germany will fall after 1.1 million people arrived last year. Germany was the final destination for the vast majority of migrants who reached the European continent in 2015.

Public unease has grown since a wave of sexual assaults on women in Cologne at New Year that police say were carried out largely by young men of Arab and North African appearance.

The interior ministry said 91,671 people had registered on the so-called EASY system in January, more than double the number in the same month a year ago, although this was more than a third down from December and less than half of November’s total.

Among last month’s total, some 35,822 were from Syria and about 18,000 from both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The EASY system records people in reception centers and then distributes them around the country based on each state’s population and tax revenues. Registration on this system is separate from officially applying for asylum.

The official number of asylum applications rose to 52,103 in January, about double the level in the same month last year and a 7.9 percent rise from December, said the ministry.

Some 1,623 people from Morocco were entered on the EASY system and the top-selling Bild daily cited government sources saying a basic agreement had been reached with North African countries about returning rejected asylum seekers there.

At the end of January, there was a backlog of some 371,754 asylum applications at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), the interior ministry said on Thursday. That was around 7,000 more than at the end of December.

(Reporting by Madeline Chambers and Holger Hansen; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

Billions pledged for Syria as tens of thousands flee bombardments

LONDON (Reuters) – Donor nations pledged on Thursday to give billions of dollars in aid to Syrians as world leaders gathered for a conference to tackle the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with Turkey reporting a new exodus of tens of thousands fleeing air strikes.

With Syria’s five-year-old civil war raging and another attempt at peace negotiations called off in Geneva after just a few days, the London conference aims to address the needs of some 6 million people displaced within Syria and more than 4 million refugees in other countries.

Underlining the desperate situation on the ground in Syria, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told the meeting that tens of thousands of Syrians were on the move toward his country to escape aerial bombardments on the city of Aleppo.

“Sixty to seventy thousand people in the camps in north Aleppo are moving toward Turkey. My mind is not now in London, but on our border – how to relocate these new people coming from Syria?” he said. “Three hundred thousand people living in Aleppo are ready to move toward Turkey.”

Turkey is already hosting more than 2.5 million Syrian refugees. Jordan and Lebanon are the other countries bearing the brunt of the Syrian refugee exodus.

Several speakers said that while the situation of refugees was bad, that of Syrians trapped inside the country enduring bombardments, sieges and, in some places, starvation was far worse.

“With people reduced to eating grass and leaves and killing stray animals in order to survive on a day-to-day basis, that is something that should tear at the conscience of all civilized people and we all have a responsibility to respond to it,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told the conference.

A U.N. envoy halted his attempts to conduct Syrian peace talks on Wednesday after the Syrian army, backed by Russian air strikes, advanced against rebel forces north of Aleppo, choking opposition supply lines from Turkey to the city.

Kerry told the conference he had spoken to his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov about the situation.

“We have agreed that we are engaged in a discussion about how to implement the ceasefire specifically as well as some immediate, possible confidence-building steps to deliver humanitarian assistance,” he said.

In a blunt attack on Russia, Turkey’s Davutoglu told a news conference that those supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces were committing war crimes and called on the United States to adopt a more decisive stance against Russia.

EDUCATION, JOBS

United Nations agencies are appealing for $7.73 billion to cope with the Syrian emergency this year, and countries in the region are asking for an additional $1.2 billion.

Conference co-hosts Britain, Norway and Germany were the first to announce their pledges, followed by the United States, the European Union, Japan and other nations.

Britain and Norway promised an extra $1.76 billion and $1.17 billion respectively by 2020, while Germany said it would give $2.57 billion by 2018. The United States said its contribution this fiscal year would be $890 million.

The almost five-year-old conflict has killed an estimated 250,000 people and stoked the spread of Islamist militancy across the Middle East and North Africa.

For European nations, improving the humanitarian situation in Syria and neighboring countries is crucial to reducing incentives for Syrians to travel to Europe.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the first steps in the Geneva peace talks had been undermined by a lack of sufficient humanitarian access and by a sudden increase in aerial bombing and military activity on the ground.

“The coming days should be used to get back to the table, not to secure more gains on the battlefield,” he said.

The conference will focus particularly on the need to provide an education for displaced Syrian children and job opportunities for adults, reflecting growing recognition that the fallout from the Syrian war will be very long-term.

(Additional reporting by Andreas Rinke and Arshad Mohammed, writing by Estelle Shirbon; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Raissa Kasolowsky)

U.S. rejects 30 Syrian refugees amid tightened security

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States has recently rejected 30 Syrians out of thousands seeking to enter the country, Obama administration officials told a congressional panel on Wednesday, as the United States tightens vetting of immigrants and other visitors following attacks in California and Paris.

In addition, hundreds of applications from Syrian refugees have been put on hold and many might ultimately be rejected, Leon Rodriguez, director of the Citizenship and Immigration Services unit of the Department of Homeland Security, told the committee.

A spokesman for Rodriguez later said that the 30 Syrian refugee applications had been rejected over the last 16 months.

At a time when millions of refugees are arriving in Europe and elsewhere from the Middle East and Africa, Democratic President Barack Obama’s pledge to take in 10,000 people fleeing war-torn Syria has come under fire, especially from Republicans. The United States so far has admitted 2,000 refugees.

Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, said at a hearing that authorities have identified about 40 violent militants who had attempted to enter Europe posing as refugees.

Other committee Republicans at the hearing questioned why the Obama administration wanted to admit any Syrian refugees, given that the Syria-based Islamic State movement has pledged to attack the United States and other western countries.

“Our intelligence community has … told me that individuals with terrorism ties in Syria have already tried to gain access to our country through the refugee program,” McCaul said.

“What’s even more concerning is that top officials have testified before this committee that intelligence gaps prevent us from being able to confidently weed out terrorists,” he said.

Rodriguez and other Homeland Security and State Department officials told the committee that U.S. procedures for vetting Syrian refugees were among the most rigorous in the world.

U.S. agencies have tightened procedures for checking backgrounds of would-be U.S. immigrants and visitors after a recent arrival from the Middle East was one of two shooters who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California.

Francis Taylor, the Homeland Security Department’s intelligence chief, said his department was routinely doing social media checks on would-be immigrants and visitors.

(Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Lisa Shumaker)

Differences in Islam play role in refugee crisis, says UK ex-foreign minister

LONDON (Reuters) – Civil wars crippling many Muslim states and fueling a global refugee crisis are driven in part by major struggles within Islam that cannot be ignored, former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said on Wednesday.

This “implosion” in about two dozen Muslim-majority countries has forced people from their homes in “unheard-of” numbers, Miliband, now head of the New York-based humanitarian group International Rescue Committee, said in a speech.

Miliband spoke at the international affairs think-tank Chatham House in London, where he will take part in a major conference on Thursday that aims to raise billions of dollars from donors to respond to the Syrian crisis.

“More people are fleeing conflict, they’re fleeing conflict significantly in Muslim-majority countries, so the implosion in the Islamic world, in Afghanistan, in the Middle East, is driving it,” he said.

Venturing into what he called “tricky territory”, he added it would be dishonest not to report that his organization’s work was increasingly focused on crises in Muslim-majority countries.

“It seems to me there are big questions, big debates happening within Islam about the reconciliation of Islam to modernity, to democracy, of different segments within the Islamic tradition,” he said.

“To pretend that that’s not part of the story wouldn’t be right,” he added, without elaborating.

In several war-torn countries, militant Sunni literalists such as the Taliban and Islamic State are battling other Muslims who want the faith more adapted to the modern world or belong to a minority sect such as Shi’ism.

Miliband added his analysis did not apply to the whole of the Muslim world, citing Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority country, and Bangladesh as two examples of countries that did not fit into the narrative.

“It’s not right to pretend that all Muslim-majority countries are undergoing this implosion,” he said. “But I think if you look at the story in South Asia over the last 30 years and the story in the Middle East over the last 20 years, then that’s part of the story.”

Miliband said the Syrian crisis was a long-term issue, with large numbers of refugees likely to be living in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and other countries for many years, and this called for a change in the scale and nature of the response.

Refugees were increasingly living in urban areas, he said, where the fact they are not separate from the general population creates new demands very different from those of refugee camps.

Dozens of heads of state and government are due to attend the London pledging conference.

The United Nations estimates that $7.73 billion is needed to meet Syrian humanitarian needs this year, with an additional $1.2 billion required by countries in the region.

(Reporting by Estelle Shirbon; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

Trying to stem refugee influx, Sweden asks: When is a child not a child?

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Under huge strain from an influx of unaccompanied children seeking asylum, the Swedish government faces political pressure to undertake medical tests like X-rays to vet the age of young refugees despite opposition from doctors and lawyers.

The controversy reflects tensions over surging immigration into the Nordic country of 10 million after a public backlash that saw controls reimposed on the border with Denmark, from which most migrants have entered Sweden.

Sweden took in 163,000 asylum seekers last year, the most per capita in Europe. They were among more than one million who streamed into the continent, fleeing increasing conflict and deprivation in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

More than a fifth, 35,000, of those reaching Sweden have been unaccompanied children, stretching services like schools.

Reports of violence and assaults at centers for minors have added to the public disquiet and hardened anti-immigrant sentiment in a country long renowned for its humanitarian open-door policy toward the wretched of the earth.

Many have arrived without IDs, leaving Sweden the task of checking their real ages to ensure adults – defined as age 18 or over – were not pretending to be minors to secure asylum.

Worried young adults may be swelling these ranks, many of Sweden’s opposition parties are calling for medical tests. Even the government has called for more non-medical testing while it awaits reform proposals in April to break the deadlock.

There is a great incentive to claim to be a minor. Applicants have greater access to housing and schools and less chance of being deported.

“At the moment, very few, if any, age assessments are being done in Sweden,” Fredrik Beijer, Director of Legal Affairs of Sweden’s Migration Agency, told Reuters.

Efforts to confirm ages have been hampered by the inability of authorities to carry out medical tests – such as X-rays of teeth and hands. The government said in November it wanted medical tests. But while such tests are not illegal, doctors have refused, saying they are inaccurate.

“We believe that for a decision that has such large consequences in an individual’s life, one must require higher precision,” said Anders Hjern, a spokesman for the Swedish Paediatric Society.

But doubts have not stopped the center right Moderates, Sweden’s biggest opposition party, calling on the migration agency to hire doctors for medical checks in an effort to lower the number of children arriving without families.

“Unaccompanied minors make up around 20 percent of asylum seekers but they cost about half the migration budget,” said Hanif Bali, an Iranian-born lawmaker for the Moderates. Bali himself came to Sweden as an unaccompanied minor at age three.

“Out of my own experience, because I have lived in these kinds of homes, the environment becomes much harsher when you have older people there. You get prison rules and many children get caught up in the older people’s trouble-making.”

Many other European Union countries do carry out medical tests. Austria, for example, allows doctors to do “age determination reports” that include checks on teeth as well as genital development. In Italy, medical-age assessments, such as X-rays, can be carried out by court order.

SWEDEN SHOCKED BY ASSAULTS

The issue of refugee minors is especially sensitive in Sweden. Reports of assaults in overcrowded minors’ centers – including a 22-year-old female Swedish employee of one center who was stabbed to death last week – have contributed to a sense authorities are overwhelmed.

“The risk of disputes and discontent is obvious, and some small detail may trigger conflict,” said Thomas Svensson, head of social affairs for the Emmaboda municipality in southeastern Sweden, where staff at a home for unaccompanied minors locked themselves in a room as 19 migrant youths rioted.

The influx of minors also carries big fiscal costs. Sweden last year had to find an extra 70,000 school places due to asylum seekers, on top of the 100,000 pupils that normally enter the school system for the first time in any given year.

Half of unaccompanied minors have been registered as between 16 and 17, often making age confirmation difficult and sparking accusations from the likes of the far-right Sweden Democrats – the third biggest party in parliament – that adults are taking advantage of soft controls to enter the country.

Even without medical tests, some 667 minors had their age “adjusted” between January and November last year, according to the justice ministry. The data does not show if it was adjusted to above 18. That compares to 363 cases for all 2014.

Proud of Sweden’s decades-old tradition as a self-proclaimed “humanitarian superpower”, the government regards most refugee minors as bona fide refugees fleeing war.

Immigration supporters say Swedes have been unduly influenced by a media frenzy linking migrants with crime that has little to do with reality. For example, despite reports of refugees being associated with sexual assaults, reported rapes fell 12 percent last year in Sweden. Thefts were down 2 percent.

The debate is part of a crisis that has cut center-left Prime Minister Stefan Lofven’s support to record lows in polls due to a popular sense that his government is largely helpless to stop a migrant influx seen as threatening Sweden’s generous welfare state and vaunted social stability.

In a sign of mounting political frustration, Migration Minister Morgan Johansson called on Sunday for the migration agency to carry out more non-medical tests, such as interviews with children.

(Additional reporting by Johan Ahlander and Johan Sennero in Stockholm, Shadia Nasralla in Vienna and Steve Scherer in Rome; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Canada’s Syrian refugee plan draws U.S. Senate panel scrutiny

WASHINGTON/OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canada is proceeding with plans to take in 25,000 Syrian refugees, but the country’s background-vetting program is under scrutiny by a U.S. congressional panel, with a hearing set for Wednesday, amid lawmaker concerns about U.S. security.

The Senate Homeland Security Committee has questions about the Ottawa government’s intake of refugees by the end of February and the possibility that violent militants could mix in and cross the long, largely porous U.S.-Canada border.

At the public hearing, senators will question U.S. and Canadian experts and a U.S. Border Patrol officer on Canada’s “fast track” resettlement program. Canada’s government turned down an invitation to send a spokesperson to the session.

“We have been in frequent touch with members of the U.S. administration who are satisfied with what we are doing … if the U.S. Senate wants to engage in these activities, that is their right, of course,” John McCallum, Canada’s immigration minister, told reporters on Tuesday.

Initial inquiries show Canada’s background checks on refugees are less rigorous than the 18- to 24-month vettings done by U.S. authorities before letting any Syrian refugee set foot on American soil, congressional aides said.

Canada’s new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has already delayed his government’s program. It had targeted resettlement of the 25,000 by the end of 2015. Now the target is February.

Still, congressional aides said, U.S. officials remain wary of Canada’s screening, noting it is nearly impossible for foreign governments to verify the backgrounds, and identities of refugees, given Syria’s dysfunctional government.

One way Canada is trying to allay concerns about infiltration of the refugee flow by violent militants is by limiting refugees it admits to women, children and lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender individuals.

Canada can vet would-be refugees in U.S. and Canadian law enforcement and intelligence databases, but congressional aides said these databases may omit critical and derogatory information on would-be immigrants’ previous lives in Syria.

Canada’s public safety minister, Ralph Goodale, told reporters on Tuesday that Canada had been “very strong in putting together the security system” used to vet the refugees, and had made a strong effort to keep U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and President Barack Obama fully informed.

(Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Andrew Hay)

German official calls for fewer migrants as registrations triple on year

BERLIN (Reuters) – The number of migrants coming to Germany needs to fall, German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel wrote in a letter on Tuesday, as data showed registrations almost tripled in January compared with the same month last year.

The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) said Germany’s states registered almost 92,000 migrants last month in the computer system called EASY, which records people in reception centers and then distributes them around the country based on each state’s population and tax revenues.

The sharp rise was probably largely due to people who had arrived last year registering later since a backlog had built up, an expert at the interior ministry said.

The refugee crisis is a “test of endurance” said Gabriel, who is also economy minister, in his letter to members of his Social Democrat (SPD) party.

It comes as Chancellor Angela Merkel faces increasing criticism for her “open-door” policy, which saw more than 1.1 million migrants enter Germany last year. Gabriel’s SPD is the junior partner in Merkel’s ruling coalition.

Merkel has also said the number of refugees needs to go down and that most refugees from Syria and Iraq would go home once the conflicts there had ended.

The federal government in Berlin, as well as states and municipalities, was beginning to feel “how the political pressure is growing and how the right-wing populists are playing with people’s fears”, Gabriel said.

“That’s why Europe must succeed, in the first half of the year, in reducing the number of refugees who come to Germany every year,” he said.

Frauke Petry, leader of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, said at the weekend that migrants entering illegally should be shot if necessary.

Her remarks prompted Gabriel to say on Sunday that Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV) should monitor the populist party, which should not be able to “excrete their slogans” on public television.

(Reporting by Thorsten Severin and Holger Hansen; writing by Michelle Martin; editing by Katharine Houreld)

Jordan needs international help over refugee crisis, king says

LONDON (Reuters) – Jordan’s King Abdullah says his country needs long-term aid from the international community to cope with a huge influx of Syrian refugees, warning that unless it received support the “dam is going to burst”.

In an interview with the BBC aired on Tuesday, King Abdullah said the refugee crisis was overloading Jordan’s social services and threatening regional stability. Jordan has already accepted more than 600,000 U.N.-registered Syrian refugees.

“Jordanians are suffering from trying to find jobs, the pressure on infrastructure and for the government, it has hurt us when it comes to the educational system, our healthcare. Sooner or later I think the dam is going to burst,” he said.

Last Thursday, officials said the European Union would promise some $2.2 billion at an international donor conference to be held in London this week to aid Syrian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq.

British Prime Minister David Cameron said last month he would press the EU to relax export rules for Jordan, to help spur economic growth.

“This week is going to be very important for Jordanians to see is there going to be help not only for Syrian refugees but for their own future as well,” King Abdullah told the BBC.

Part of the U.S.-led coalition that is bombing Syria, Jordan has long been praised for helping refugees and been a big beneficiary of foreign aid as a result.

However, it has drawn criticism from western allies and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees over the situation near its border with Syria, where thousands of refugees are being kept far from any aid.

The situation has deteriorated since Russia started air strikes last September to support President Bashar al-Assad.

King Abdullah said if Jordan was not helped, the refugee crisis would worsen.

“The international community, we’ve always stood shoulder to shoulder by your side. We’re now asking for your help, you can’t say no this time,” he said.

(Reporting by Michael Holden; editing by Katharine Houreld)

German government rejects ‘absurd’ remark of populist party leader on shooting migrants

BERLIN (Reuters) – Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government rejected on Monday as “absurd” a suggestion from the leader of an increasingly popular opposition right-wing party that police be given powers to use firearms against illegal migrants.

Support for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has jumped amid deepening public unease over Merkel’s open-door policy for refugees from Syria and elsewhere after some 1.1 million people entered Germany last year.

Asked about AfD leader Frauke Petry’s suggestion on the use of firearms against migrants, Merkel’s chief of staff Peter Altmaier said: “This proposal is inhuman and absurd. With this suggestion, the AfD has shown its true colours.”

Speaking to local newspapers in an interview to be published on Tuesday, Altmaier said he thought support for the AfD would now fall. Opinion polls currently put it in third place on about 13 percent, behind Merkel’s conservatives and her centre-left coalition partner, the Social Democrats (SPD).

But German disquiet over the scale of immigration has grown, especially since men of north African and Arab appearance assaulted women in Cologne and other German cities on New Year’s Eve.

Petry’s deputy, Beatrix von Storch, who is a member of the European Parliament, even suggested on social media that police should be allowed to shoot at migrant women with children in cases of emergency to stop them entering Germany illegally.

A German Interior Ministry spokesman also said on Monday there could be no question of using force against the migrants.

“It goes without saying: no German policeman will use a firearm against people who are searching for protection in Germany,” spokesman Johannes Dimroth told a news conference.

“And it goes without saying that the use of firearms against people to stop an illegal border crossing is unlawful.”

Vice Chancellor and SPD leader Sigmar Gabriel said on Sunday Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV) should monitor the AfD, adding that the party should not be able to “excrete their slogans” on public television.

In an attempt at damage control, Petry said in a statement on Monday her party was “strictly against” shooting at people who peacefully ask to enter the country.

“Border security needs to be guaranteed within the framework of existing laws and strictly in accordance with the principle of proportionality,” she added.

(Reporting by Joseph Nasr and Michael Nienaber; Editing by Gareth Jones)

Germany’s Merkel says refugees must return home once war is over

NEUBRANDENBURG, Germany (Reuters) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel tried on Saturday to placate the increasingly vocal critics of her open-door policy for refugees by insisting that most refugees from Syria and Iraq would go home once the conflicts there had ended.

Despite appearing increasingly isolated, Merkel has resisted pressure from some conservatives to cap the influx of refugees, or to close Germany’s borders.

Support for her conservative bloc has slipped as concerns mount about how Germany will integrate the 1.1 million migrants who arrived last year, while crime and security are also in the spotlight after a wave of assaults on women in Cologne at New Year by men of north African and Arab appearance.

The influx has played into the hands of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose support is now in the double digits, and whose leader was quoted on Saturday saying that migrants entering illegally should, if necessary, be shot.

Merkel said it was important to stress that most refugees had only been allowed to stay for a limited period.

“We need … to say to people that this is a temporary residential status and we expect that, once there is peace in Syria again, once IS has been defeated in Iraq, that you go back to your home country with the knowledge that you have gained,” she told a regional meeting of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

Merkel said 70 percent of the refugees who fled to Germany from former Yugoslavia in the 1990s had returned.

Horst Seehofer, leader of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, has threatened to take the government to court if the flow of asylum seekers is not cut.

Merkel urged other European countries to offer more help “because the numbers need to be reduced even further and must not start to rise again, especially in spring”.

A MILLION MORE

Fabrice Leggeri, the head of the European Union’s border agency Frontex, said a U.N. estimate that up to a million migrants could try to come to Europe via the eastern Mediterranean and Western Balkans next year was realistic.

“It would be a big achievement if we could keep the number … stable,” he told the magazine Der Spiegel.

Merkel said all EU states should have an interest in protecting the bloc’s external borders, and all would suffer if the internal passport-free Schengen zone collapsed and national borders were closed.

AfD leader Frauke Petry told the Mannheimer Morgen newspaper that Germany needed to reduce the influx through agreements with neighboring Austria and a reinforcement of the EU’s external borders.

But she also said it should not be shy about turning people back and creating “border protection installations” – and that border guards should, if necessary, shoot at migrants trying to enter illegally.

No police officer wanted to shoot at a migrant, Petry said, adding “I don’t want that either but, ultimately, deterrence includes the use of armed force”.

Such comments evoke memories of Germany’s Cold War division, when guards in the communist East, led by Erich Honecker, were under orders to shoot people attempting to cross the heavily fortified border into the West.

“The last German politician who let refugees be shot at was Erich Honecker,” said Thomas Oppermann, a senior member of the Social Democrats.

(Additional reporting and writing by Michelle Martin in Berlin; Editing by Kevin Liffey)