“That´s not right at all that some countries say: ´generally speaking, we don´t want to have Muslims in our countries´”, Merkel told German public television channel ARD.
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She suggested she was open to changes in the EU’s planned quota system, which aims to transfer of about 160,000 asylum seekers from Greece and Italy to other European Union states, but said it was important to find a solution that shared responsibility.
According to the Migration Policy Institute Europe, Germany has recently implemented several important changes to its immigration and asylum policy such as delaying family reunifications for some refugees by up to two years, and making it harder for refugees to obtain permanent residency and to shorten temporary resident permits. Some of the EU’s 28 member states have said they will not co-operate.
Islamophobia underpins the refusal in many cases, as the majority of refugees come from Muslim-majority nations like Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Slovak President Robert Fico said he would “never bring even a single Muslim into his country”.
There is widespread concern about how to integrate them into German society and the labour market, and support for the anti-immigrant party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has grown.
Previous year about one million refugees entered Germany, with many escaping violence and persecution in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, and making the treacherous journey across the Mediterranean sea.
“We can ensure optimal services for up to 300,000. should more people arrive, it would put us under pressure, then we would go into so-called crisis mode”.
Weise added that if more people were to come than estimated, his office would come under pressure, but he suggested he was not anxious about such a scenario, saying it was instead likely that fewer than 300,000 would come this year.
BAMF chief Frank-Juergen Weise told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that Germany’s healthy economy and improvements to refugee services over the previous year meant that the country was well-placed to absorb new arrivals, particularly as their numbers have dropped off.
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Instead of taking in refugees en masse, some eastern European countries want to provide other forms of help – such as border guards for other EU countries – and have suggested that the European Commission could offset those contributions against its proposed distribution quota.
