In connection with the unprecedented increase in the number of asylum seekers in Germany, the country's authorities decided to significantly expand the staff of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. This decision was made during the first Federation summit on regulating immigration flows, held on May 8. As Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière stated, the staff of his subordinate agency will gradually increase from the current 2,800 employees to 4,800 people. In addition, at a meeting in the Chancellery, it was decided to increase the volume of housing construction for accommodating refugees, as well as to expand the number of German language courses.
As the meeting participants emphasized, the main goal of the authorities remains to speed up the processing of asylum applications. This period should generally not exceed three months, but in reality people have to wait for a response from immigration authorities for an average of up to six months. As of the beginning of April, up to 200,000 applications for asylum remained unprocessed.
Critics of the summit at the Chancellery noted that representatives of German municipalities were not invited to the meeting. Yet it is the local authorities that bear the brunt of accommodating and providing social support for the new refugees. Here is how the mayor of Berlin's Neukölln district, Franziska Giffey, commented on the results of the summit for "Russkaya Germaniya":
"The main point for us here is the specific actions of the federal government in terms of helping municipal authorities. But unfortunately, no clear plan is visible yet. Look, people arrive every day, who first of all need to be housed somewhere. But simply providing refugees with a bed and food is not enough. After all, then we face numerous problems related to schools, vocational training issues, integration courses, and finally, the life prospects for the people who have arrived.
We have a lot of people coming from countries in the western Balkans. But in our district we make no distinction between them and citizens of other countries. For example, the children of these refugees, just like all other children, go to school, where they study for two to three weeks until a negative decision is made on their parents' status. Then they are forced to go back to their homeland, which is of course very difficult. I must say that the issue of reducing the processing time for asylum applications is one thing, but the implementation of the decisions of the authorities is quite another. The question is whether people who have been refused actually return home? I see serious shortcomings here.
According to Federation estimates, the German capital will receive 15,000 new refugees this year; we ourselves assume a figure of 20,000. The city needs to build at least nine thousand additional housing places. Currently we are under enormous pressure. I can say that our administration staff contact officials of the State Office for Health and Social Affairs up to a thousand times a day to resolve all issues regarding the accommodation of refugees. This is a very serious burden that we have to reckon with, and which we are coping with so far.
For example, we need significant support from the Federation in the field of education. In our district, we need to find new educators, new teachers, additional instructors for integration courses. It is clear that new staff must be paid. It is a pity that representatives of municipalities were not present at the meeting at the Chancellery. This is a signal that, unfortunately, not everything is going in the right direction."