The Berlin Crowd At Work

Late yesterday, the German leadership met up in Berlin and agreed on a number of refugee topics.

First, Berlin will pay out to each state government a sum of 670 Euro for each refugee they house, per month.  It's a fair sum of cash and probably double what some expected Berlin to agree to.  If you figure roughly ten Euro a day on food provided to the refugees (300 Euro), and incidental costs (heat, electricity, travel, etc).....then it probably gets up near the ninety-percent point of what an average refugee costs.  Course, there's the language and integration classes (figure one thousand Euro as a minimum) and that will come from some pot of money.

The second big deal of this meeting is that Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro are now declared "safe countries of origin".  Translated?  Well.....the guys who control the approval process....can basically pull up roughly two-hundred-thousand files and start hitting 'disapproved' rather quickly.  Naturally.....if you've been sitting in some compound area for six months and kept thinking you'd get approved to stay (being from Kosovo for example)....well, this will be a shock as they note you fail at immigration.

This will turn into a very hectic and frustrating moment for thousands of guys in these camps....angry over the change of events and disturbed that some Syrian guy will get a chance that you won't get.

A legal challenge to come?  I would suspect that someone will quickly put this to a legal test and the German court system....ever famous for two-year discussions before rendering a verdict.....might create a bigger mess by getting involved in this.

Last night....ARD (state-run channel One)....ran an update piece that was loaded with facts and numbers (something rare).

For 2014, they noted that 122,000 Syrians came into Germany....while from the safe countries of origin....it was around 105,000 people who applied.  From Africa, it was around 70,000 people who applied for immigration in Germany.

Yeah, it translates to mean that roughly a third of the total for 2014 were Syrians.

For 2015?  You probably won't get any real facts until the spring of 2016.  It might shock folks to realize that roughly half of the million that came in 2015....were from safe countries of origin and were sent back to their country.