More than 1,500 migrants are being trafficked into Germany every week by people smugglers, a figure that is expected to rise considerably as warmer temperatures arrive, the chairman of Germany’s largest police union has warned.
Andreas Roßkopf of the GDP police union revealed the concerning figures to German newspaper Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung, claiming that professional gangs are taking advantage of Europe’s porous borders and raking in the profits. “These are full professionals who advertise with a guarantee of success,” he said.
“We are currently detecting around 1,500 illegal entries per week at the borders. It will certainly not stop there. With every month that gets warmer, more people come,” he told the newspaper’s editorial team.
The police union chief called for federal police to be better equipped, claiming technical resources including drones, cameras and more modern emergency vehicles are required to stem the flow. He stopped short of calling for permanent border controls, however, insisting the country does not have the personnel to effectively man the borders.
“We can’t afford that in Germany, we don’t have the number of police officers who are needed for this,” he told the newspaper.
Roßkopf revealed how Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) received 26,149 asylum applications in February alone, with the majority of these — around 24,000 — being first-time applicants. The figure is almost double that of February last year when 13,915 asylum applications were submitted.
February’s figure is higher than October last year when 23,918 asylum applications were registered, the highest number in a single month in almost six years.
Nearly 92,000 people entered Germany illegally at the end of last year, with figures rising considerably in the latter half of the year; there was a total of 244,132 asylum applications, 50,000 more than the previous year.
In addition, Germany has seen almost 1 million Ukrainian refugees — of whom only a third plan to return to their home country after the war. Municipalities are expressing their concern about federal distribution quotas that have already resulted in a number of German citizens being evicted from their homes to make way for refugees.
A total of 115 residents of an apartment building in Stuttgart were issued an eviction notice last month, telling them to leave their homes by the end of August because local authorities needed to accommodate Ukrainian refugees.
So too in Berlin, where 110 nursing home seniors were recently evicted by a Christian organization in order for the local authorities to comply with federal distribution quotas.
Also last month, around 40 German tenants in the town of Lörrach in southern Germany had their apartment contracts terminated to cater to Ukrainian refugees, with one elderly resident telling local media the eviction notice was tantamount to “an early death notice.”