After a while, if you are a non-German living in Germany.....you tend to see something odd about the whole asylum/immigration episode unfolding. It is upon the local town or city to provide housing, support, food, and necessary services to the new immigrants/asylum seekers upon arrival....NOT the state government apparatus or federal government apparatus.
You'd look at this and ask why? And there simply isn't any logical explanation given except this has been handed down to this town to provide a structure....a building....a living spot....for the refugees.
In the beginning....the federal government of Berlin wasn't going to provide much of anything in terms of funding.
After about a year, the Berlin government came to agree on some funding and a loan-deal where they'd get paid back. It's a no-interest type loan but you have to pay the money taken....back to the German federal government.
In the past two months, Berlin has said it'll up the funding by a big chunk. A one-for-one Euro pay-back? Well.....no, that's not what they've said.
So I come back to this odd deal....why doesn't the federal government of Germany just run all of this themselves? Why not just build up a dozen refugee centers around the country using old NATO or US basing situations, and just let the German federal government folks run the operation themselves?
I've come to this belief about why it isn't done this way. I think there are so many Germans who aren't happy with asylum seekers or refugees.....that by making it a local thing....it's less friction and they seem to support it slightly more. If it were a massive Berlin decision to put one big center in Mainz-Kastel at a former US military post.....the bulk of people around Wiesbaden would be up in arms. Because you nickel-and-dime this living arrangement deal.....there's only 100 refugees here, and 200 refugees there. It doesn't appear to be a big deal by making it all appear small in nature.
A fraud? Well.....yeah.....but it's the only way that you fake the German voters out of a major issue. I think all of the political parties agree.....it's best to make the cities and towns play the game instead of the federal government or end up in a blame-game situation.
By avoiding the Berlin connection.....it's all remained simply a non-issue....at least until the local governments admit that they've spent money on these refugees that would have paid for infrastructure projects instead. Once some German city council stands up and says such-and-such project discussed for five years (renovation of some park or some cobble-stone project for the downtown area) is suddenly delayed indefinitely......then folks start to ask why. That's why Berlin is now pressed into paying out more funding.
No one says much over the cost, but if you take an older building....like an outdated school and convert it for refugee living....there's probably 40,000 Euro somewhere in the spending plan to fix it enough to make it appear decent for folks to live within. After that, you can figure at least 200 Euro a month for food for each person, with heat and electricity figured in.....it's not exactly a free-deal like Berlin would like people to think. And this only gets you by for a group of say....forty-odd refugees. Multiply that by a couple of hundred and you got a significant amount of money put into a national agenda.
There never was much of a real plan on how to handle this, but this gimmick of sorts.....pretending in the original phase not to fund the requirements....turns this all into a joke. My suspicion is that as things heat up in the summer of 2016 and the election of 2017.....suddenly the bills for the past five years will be added up and every town will get paid back fully for what they put into the operation.
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