Dr Merkel countered politicians in some countries who have warned that the refugee crisis has exposed problems in Europe’s Schengen passport-free area, saying that states must develop it further by agreeing on migrant quotas.
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The idea that Europe can’t take more refugees was previously voiced by French Prime Minister Manuel Valls on Wednesday who called for the cessation of Europe’s migrant influx. “Anything else would put Europe’s capability of effectively securing its border at risk”.
“The public sector directly demands more goods and services to deal with the influx of refugees and the refugees themselves boost private demand as they also spend money in Germany”, said Stefan Kipar, an economist at Bayerische Landesbank in Munich.
Mrs Merkel says terrorism and refugees are separate issues.
“We can not accommodate any more refugees in Europe”, Valls told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, adding that tighter control of Europe’s external borders would determine the fate of the European Union.
“We can not take any more refugees in Europe”.
Valls made the comment just before German Chancellor Angela Merkel was scheduled to meet with French President Francois Hollande in Paris. “It was not France that said ‘Come!”, the French prime minister said in an apparent reference to Germany’s decision to open its borders to refugees last September.
The November 13 attacks in Paris which killed 130 people only added renewed vigor to the demands.
While the economics of Germany’s refugee dilemma are straightforward enough, the politics are anything but, with growing demands throughout the country – and even within Merkel’s own coalition – to curb migration in the wake of the deadly Paris terrorist attacks.
“Germany stands at France’s side in the fight against terror”, Merkel said in an address to the lower house of parliament. The German leader stressed the importance of working to resolve the Syrian Civil War, the main trigger of the refugee crisis now faced by the 28-member European Union. The statistics also point that more than 1 million migrants might reach Germany by the end of the year.
“The solutions are over there (in the Middle East)”.
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De Maiziere recalled that when he served his previous term as interior minister from 2009 to 2011, Germany had almost 40,000 asylum seekers per year.
