At the beginning of 2018 in Germany, there was this huge political confrontation between Merkel's CDU-CSU Party and the SPD Party.....as the coalition talks went on, on the topic of controlled immigration. The SPD Party and elements of the CDU Party....wanted a fairly high number allocated to immigrants. The CSU Party (the Bavarian Conservatives) and probably half of the CDU folks...wanted a number in the 200,000 range. The agreed upon number, after a vast debate, with great public forum chatter....was 180,000 to 220,000.
Well....ARD (German public TV, Channel One), came up and had an update for 2018 immigration trend.
The number of migrants applying for asylum/immigration? 198,000.
But that's not all of the 'trend-story'. Roughly 18,500 of this year and past year's migration group.....packed and left. Roughly 26,000 folks of this year and year's past.....left because they'd filed an asylum application in another EU country or had failed the application process.
The curious thing is that a massive amount of arguing and public attention was drawn to this topic and the effort to push the threshold up (to well over 300,000). In some ways, this effort by pro-asylum crowd (within both the CDU and SPD).....probably hurt both in terms of public polling and has lessen their appeal to some minor degree. Some SPD voters were angered on the other side of the discussion.....thinking the agreed upon number was too low, and they drifted over to the Green Party.
What makes the 198k unique? If you used the German statistics from mid-90s to now.....the average was always around 200,000 to 250,000 (with the exception of the Balkans war period).
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