Germany is facing difficulties in taking in more migrants, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on Wednesday.
“Germany, like Italy, is at the limit of its capacity,” Steinmeier said in an interview with Italian Newspaper Corriere della Sera, pointing out that Germany had received a third of all EU asylum requests in the first half of 2023.
The president acknowledged that both Italy and Germany had “heavy loads to bear” and called for a “fair distribution” of migratory burdens within Europe.
It is apparent that the asylum system is broken. Europe and North America need immigrants, but we need them to arrive in an organized, thoughtful manner that helps migrants integrate, get jobs, find affordable housing, and learn the local language. It takes lots of infrastructure to accommodate millions of extra people, which is why unrestrained migration just doesn’t work, for anyone. The problems of mass migration then become a flashpoint for the far right to take advantage of the population’s discontent.
But, instead of making legal immigration easy and productive, we pay companies like Frontex, who violate human rights, to keep everyone out. Human trafficking is only a business because we make it next to impossible for refugees to immigrate legally.
Illegal is the wrong adjective for asylum seekers, because the right of asylum explicitly states, that you do not have to do anything before arriving in the EU. There is no way of seeking asylum illegally.
Refugees which only exist because “first world countries” fouled up their homelands through political and industrial fuckery and made them unliveable.
The migrant conundrum is only going to get worse as more and more places in the world become harder to live in. Climate change disasters bankrupt governments, record heatwaves crash worker productivity and raise societal tension, flooding destroys large swathes of previously usable housing, and social unrest follows, along with corruption and political volatility across the board.
And those people have to go somewhere.
Meanwhile, places that actually have resources and haven’t been hobbled yet by natural disasters and cultural upheaval - like Germany - just want to turn their backs, as if they don’t have anything to do with the problem and therefore have no responsibility for dealing with it.
You’re conflating asylum with immigration.
Almost all migrants call for asylum, and it’s then on the country to process it and evaluate if it is true. In that time, typically the asylum seeker will be able to stay. There is afaik no reason not to request asylum. So the two are very much linked in practice.
Conservatives will never go for that
Maybe Europe shouldn’t have fucked up Africa and the US shouldn’t have fucked uo South America. You have to admit that there’s a certain karma to the situation, although unfortunately the poor and the migrants, as usual, get the worst of it.
Nah I don’t have to admit that there is any supernatural karma to the situation. I imagine that is you trying to rationalize a world that shows all evidence to be indifferent to human suffering.
Bad things happen to good people, bad people, and everyone in-between. Good things operate the same way. By acknowledging this we can be kind to people suffering because we know that it is at its core an unjust existence.