GE201 – Companion text for Week 5:
Draft German version for discussion in class. Focus on emboldened sections
only!
The Migration Crisis
The growing scale of the migrant crisis was underlined by an EU report last
week showing that a record 107,500 migrants reached Europe last month, more
than three times the figure for July 2014. Germany predicted that it would take
in 800,000 asylum seekers this year
Despite the rapid rise in migrant numbers, Germany announced it was easing
the rules for accepting asylum seekers. In future, refugees from Syria will not
be subject to the EU’s so-called Dublin Protocol, which requires asylum seekers
to make their case in the first EU country they enter or risk being sent back.
Earlier, a poll found that 93% of Germans favoured offering asylum to anyone
fleeing conflict. But dozens of police officers were injured in clashes with right-wing
protesters outside an asylum seekers’ shelter in the eastern town of Heidenau.
Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned the violence as “repugnant” and said it
was “disgraceful” that the protesters, who shouted racist slogans and chanted
the Nazi Horst Wessel song, appeared to have the support of some local
families.
Angela Merkel has warned that the refugee crisis could “preoccupy Europe much, much
more” than the woes of the Euro and the Greek economy, said James Ferguson in
The Independent on Sunday. That may be an “understatement”: more refugees
are now moving across Europe than at any time since 1945.
It’s all too easy to talk of fair “burden sharing”, said Philip Johnston in The Daily
Telegraph. But how could it possibly work? Migrants might be sent to one
particular country, but once inside the Schengen area, where all frontier
controls have gone, they would be free to travel wherever they pleased. Even
some die-hard Europhiles are now Schengen-sceptics, said the Daily Mail.
Germany says it may be necessary to suspend the 1985 pact. “Like so much about the
EU dream of ‘ever closer union’, an agreement launched in a spirit of woolly-minded
idealism is coming to grief on the rocks of reality.”
Germany and France are now working on joint proposals for dealing with the crisis.
Merkel suggested this week that these could include new migrant “registration centres”
in Greece and Italy run by EU staff.
[The Week, 29 August 2015]
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