German Cities Claim They Need More Financial Support to Deal With High Number of Refugees

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More than 1.2 million refugees were registered in Germany last year, and the cities hosting them claim that they need more financial support in order to be able to care for them.

The Bielefeld, which is a city of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany with a population of 340,000, is also dealing with the high number of Ukrainian war refugees. The city has so far taken in 4,000 of them, SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz has previously promised that given the large influx of refugees into the country, state and local governments will continue to receive billions of euros to ensure that the new arrivals are well taken care of.

As the InfoMigrants reports, the mayor of Bielefeld Pit Clausen said that more than half of those 4,000 Ukrainians live with relatives or acquaintances. In addition, he said that all children have been placed in nurseries and schools.

โ€œBasically, the system has taken everyone on and accommodated them. The first arrivals already have jobs, and have moved on with their lives,โ€ he also noted.

The data provided by the Federal Statistical Office, Destatis, have revealed that in 2022 over one million people from Ukraine have reached Germany.

The same source shows that net immigration from Ukraine reached 962,000 last year, which was higher than that from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan combined between 2014 and 2016, which was 834,000.

From a summit held last fall on refugee policy, the federal government made 4,000 additional apartments available for Ukrainian refugees. So far, only about two-thirds of them are occupied.

Germany has about 11,000 cities and towns, where only a few can report a positive experience with the influx of refugees.

Last year, Germany also accepted about 244,000 asylum seekers from other countries, but mostly they came from Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey and Iraq.

In addition, officials at the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) announced that more than 100,000 asylum seekers who arrived in Germany last year were not registered by EU border authorities before entering teh country.

BAMF said the Eurodac database did not provide information on two-thirds of people who submitted an asylum application in 2022.

The same pointed out that about 35,000 cases the applicants had already submitted an application in another EU country as well.

Green Party district administrator Jens Marco Scherf added that Miltenberg, a district in Bavaria, had to accept more asylum seekers than during the last major period of recondite arrivals in 2015.

Moreover, Germany allows Ukrainians, but not most other refugees, to enter the country and almost immediately move in with relatives or friends, rather than waiting for long processing periods in refugee centers. This comes as a result that about 30 per cent of other asylum seekers already have relatives in Germany.

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