Despite the strong words, police said about 150 demonstrators in Leipzig blocked a bus on Monday night from picking up refugees temporarily housed in a sports hall to take them to Heidenau, the dpa news agency reported. Attacks on asylum shelters occur almost every day.
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Attacks on migrant shelters have risen alarmingly since 2014. In 2010, she said multiculturalism in Germany had “utterly failed” and that migrants looking to settle in Germany had to do a better job integrating themselves into German communities.
“That is obscene and unworthy of our country”. There have been more than 200 similar attacks this year.
The two leaders made the remarks at a joint press conference after their meeting in Berlin.
“It’s appalling how right-wingers and neo-Nazis try to spread their hollow messages of hatred around a refuge shelter”.
Marxloh, considered one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in all of Germany, has a very high crime rate.
Merkel, who has been criticised for failing to forcefully address the wave of anti-migrant sentiment until this week, will on Wednesday visit a refugee centre targeted by far-right extremists and neo-Nazis in the eastern town of Heidenau.
In Brussels, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said that political “finger-pointing” and not his executive were to blame for the growing refugee crisis.
The UN called on Europe to “establish a human-rights based, coherent and comprehensive migration policy”, as the bloc struggles to agree a response to the unprecedented numbers of refugees arriving.
Few of the asylum seekers in Heidenau dared to talk to the media.
Ms Merkel says the EU’s laws about registering migrants are not being followed by some countries.
On Saturday, some 2,000 rain-soaked migrants rushed past baton-wielding Macedonian officers, who had been sealing the border for three days. Germany has now said it will process the majority of such claims.
“The immigrants who arrive in Germany this year alone will cost the government 10 billion euros”, Spain’s El Mundo wrote, adding that Chancellor Angela Merkel was looking for ways to either curtail or reroute the migrant flows to the Balkans.
Merkel is travelling on Thursday to Vienna, where she will meet Balkan leaders to find out why “so many thousands of people are coming from these countries”, her spokesman Steffen Seibert said. And the atmosphere of racism we saw is not at all acceptable. Authorities were seeking alternative accommodation arrangements for them.
According to The Guardian, Google deleted a map of refugee shelters that the project was maintaining, because it seemed to amount to a map of targets for violent right-wingers to attack. “They don’t get it, they say come here to Germany, we’re open”. “The marches and acts of violence stem from a tiny group that often has the support of rent-a-mob hooligans”.
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And this weekend, when more than 30 German police officers were injured in violent protests by neo-Nazis opposed to the arrival of refugees at a holding center in Heidenau, she stayed silent on the issue for a full two days.
