Media have been reporting about high crime rates and mass protests at these anchor centers. For example, on May 2, hundreds of migrants in the German town of Ellwangen threatened security forces and forced police to release a man who was due to be deported to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In the city of Manching, the police were reportedly called to the local transit center 355 times in 2017. This center is considered by the German authorities as a prototype for the future “anchor centers.”
According to The Guardian, the German authorities managed to deport 1,000 individuals from the center in Manching since 2015, while another 2,500 others left voluntarily.
The German opposition parties have harshly criticized Seehofer’s new policies. In particular, the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) have called on the government to amend legislation and automatically repatriate all asylum seekers who had been accepted once the war in their region or country as over. The FDP insists “that should be the limit of asylum rights.”
“This decision by the Minister of Interior comes four years too late. Germany should have never opened the borders to all migrants who wanted to come to our country, without any control. So doing, they have made the necessary expulsions very difficult,” Jorg Meuthen, the spokesman of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, told Sputnik.
Seehofer has not done anything to deal with the migration crisis between 2015 and 2017, when his party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), was in a ruling coalition with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Meuthen continued.
“It is pitiful to see the present attempts at controlling a situation that is clearly out of hand. Horst Seehofer’s initiative is merely a flimsy maneuver in the current electoral campaign in Bavaria and Hesse. The so-called anchor centers will not solve the problem, because many more new migrants are coming in every day, than Seehofer’s holding centers could ever send back,” the AfD spokesman pointed out.
High Cost of Accepting Migrants
Steven Woolfe, the member of the European Parliament for the United Kingdom, recalled that in May 2016, the German government had admitted that they had estimated the cost of welcoming refugees at 93.6 billion euros ($110.3 billion) by 2020 for Germany alone.
“We speak of huge sums of money: more than 20 billion euros a year. Next, to it, you have the contribution of the EU, which has announced on its side a cost of 14.2 billion EUR for their migration budget. And let’s not forget the 4.4 billion euros promised or already given to Turkey by the EU, to avoid getting more migrants through the Aegean sea,” Woolfe, who had also worked as the spokesperson on migration for the UK Independence Party, told Sputnik.
In the lawmaker’s point of view, Merkel made a “monumental, historical error” when she opened Germany, and subsequently the entire continent of Europe, to all migrants and asylum seekers coming from the Middle East and Northern Africa, without setting up controls or detention centers.
Woolfe recalled that since 2014, Germany had taken in some 2.3 million people. The politician called this number an enormous influx which would change the face of Germany and Europe forever.