About an hour's drive south of Stuttgart....deep into Baden-Wurttemberg...is Sigmaringen. It's a town of 18,000 roughly. The mention of the town was around 1077. It comes in references when some invader force came to conqueror the Sigmaringen Castle. It should be noted that the invasion and conquering business was a total failure and the locals drove the bad guys out.
Sigmaringen came up in the news this weekend because politicians from the state-level got into the planning stage of using the old Bundeswehr Army barracks there....for refugees.....as a permanent long-term location.
Naturally, the mayor, the city council, and the locals....aren't happy.
They've gone to a protest type situation and are attempting to halt the plan.
The impact of this idea of setting up the barracks as a refugee holding center? The barracks would hold about 1,250 folks, and there's a belief that local accommodations will be found for another 450 folks....meaning that 1,700 will be in the local area. This equals approximately 10-percent (just under that) of the regional population.
Why the negativity? Well....with the temp center that was in operation, the mayor noted that alcohol-fueled refugees set that center on fire....requiring more than one visit to put the fire out. Cops also got called into that episode because the refugees weren't allowing the firemen to do their job.
Part of this issue also revolves around the former barracks which the city had some plans to renovate and turn into a business 'fertile' zone.
What will likely occur? I'm guessing that the state and the city will have a long argument, and in the end.....fewer than 800 refugees (my humble guess) will be quartered there, with some promise of state money for increased security.
There is some trend existing where long-term waiting, negativity among refugees, and alcohol consumption are leading to problems. It's not just Sigmaringen.....you can look around all of Germany and find the same issues brewing to some degree. I would question how the alcohol comes because there just isn't a lot of money given to the migrant/immigrants. You can figure in one month, you only have a small amount of pocket-money, and just throwing five or six Euro for some really cheap but strong booze might be your single chance of off-time.
Adding to this, you have a lot of folks who lived in countries where booze wasn't available and they don't know how to drink responsibly. You can imagine some migrant guys sitting there at midnight, a cheap bottle being passed around, and some stupid argument starting up over a worthless topic, and then a fight breaks out or someone gets stupid and starts a fire.
This is all part of the negativity brewing with Germans beyond Berlin, the Bundestag, and 'good-German' expectation. People look at events and just shake their head because they'd rather not play some game like this and take extra risks.
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