By Gunnar Schupelius
Local politicians from all over Germany feel overwhelmed by the uncontrolled immigration. The problem is only ignored in Berlin, although the problems here are even greater, says Gunnar Schupelius.
The election campaign is in its sixth week, with elections taking place on February 12. The parties make every effort to woo voters. Each has found its topic: The left is fighting for expropriation, the SPD for the 29 euro ticket, the CDU for the car, the Greens for the bicycle and the FDP for a functioning administration.
No party deals with the immigration of foreigners except the AfD. Is the topic unimportant? No, on the contrary: local politicians know that there is hardly a bigger problem than uncontrolled immigration.
This is clearly formulated outside of Berlin. MPs from Hesse sent a fire letter to the Chancellor: “Control and limit the influx of refugees actively! Take a close look to see who needs our help and who doesn’t! Actively bring people back who are unlawfully in the Federal Republic so that we can use our resources for those who really need our help!”
The letter was written by politicians from the Greens, the SPD, the FDP and the CDU. They no longer have apartments, kindergartens and schools are full.
The Bavarian district council also warned the federal government: Without a noticeable limitation on the influx of migrants and refugees, “integration at the municipal level will fail”.
Finally, the district administrators of Brandenburg declared this week that they no longer wanted to accept asylum seekers who foreseeably had no chance of asylum and called on the state government to deport rejected asylum seekers. The market for accommodation is “empty”.
It looks like Hesse, Bavaria and Brandenburg everywhere. Last year, 217,774 people made an initial application for asylum in Germany. This is what the current statistics from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees say.
That is 47 percent more than in 2021 and more than at any time since the immigration wave of 2015/16. This does not include around one million people from Ukraine who fled to Germany in 2022.
The asylum seekers come mainly from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Turkey. This year, even more immigration of this kind is expected. Smugglers keep opening up new routes into the EU.
Most migrants are heading for Germany, and a particularly large number of them head for Berlin. The problems are therefore greater here than in the districts of Bavaria, Hesse and Brandenburg. But here you don’t talk about it, you look the other way.
Small children cover their eyes and think that then they cannot be seen. Our politicians proceed in a similar way: they turn a blind eye to the asylum problem and hope that it will then disappear. But it stays and keeps getting bigger.
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