German politics is a bit difficult at the moment. Lots of internal debates in the political parties CDU/CSU, SPD, GRÜNE, LINKE, …some also done via media channels. Within the German government (coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD) they do agree on bringing the number of new arrivals down significantly, but still argue about how this should be done. Should the borders be closed, if yes, the German borders or the EU borders?
Some numbers and some decisions which are now known:
– From January 1st to January 17th 2016 almost 52,000 new arrivals in Germany. On average around 3,000 arrivals each day despite of the cold and bad weather conditions along the Turkey-Greece shores and sending back a few hundreds of people back to Austria each day (only people who want to ask for asylum in Germany are allowed to enter now).
– News from today: The BAMF announced that they will work on asylum-request from Morocco, Tunesia, Algeria with high priority (because of the increase of people coming from those countries). Few asylum requests are granted until now for people from those countries, but handling each request currently takes several months. Soon they plan to use the centres at Manching and Bamberg which worked and still work on the asylum-requests of people from e.g. Kosovo, Albania, Montenegro – they need currently only 5 to 10 days to decide about each request.
Note: For Munich, this will mean that very soon, few or no people from
all the countries considered to be „safe home countries“ will stay here in this area. This will very likely then also have an impact on the need of volunteers who could help out as translators.