Germans Are Welcoming Refugees To Their Country In The Most Brilliant Way

Across Germany at the weekend, banners were hoisted at Bundesliga football matches that said simply “Welcome Refugees”. Cameron said specific details of the resettlement plan would be announced next week. Non-EU nations akin to Serbia and Macedonia have been shuttling arrivals to the Hungarian border, the place they will enter the Schengen zone and get on with their journeys.

The hashtag #refugeeswelcome has spread virally among Twitter users in Europe. A US-style green card lottery – with a real chance of winning – could help the asylum system focus more on the refugees. And in Barcelona, in response to Colau’s appeal, hundreds of residents have offered rooms in their homes to migrants who might be admitted to Spain.

There were also strong rises from eastern European countries such as Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia.

“Nobody would like to stay in Hungary“, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said during a press conference.

Although the majority of people arriving in Hungary would qualify for refugee status, some are trying to reach Europe in search of economic opportunities rather than safety.

Spain has agreed to take fewer than 3,000.

But Frelick also notes that “economic migrants” can also have compelling reasons to seek shelter in Europe.

Merkel, who was criticised for being slow to condemn violent protests against refugees in an east German town last month, saw her approval ratings slip by 4 points from the previous month to 63 percent in the Infratest Dimap survey.

To others that’s immaterial.

Most of the others, however, are twisting themselves into contortions to avoid letting people in.

To veteran political journalist Philip Stevens, the handling of the crisis has seen “lofty rhetoric about collective action gainsaid by a fearful retreat into the narrowest of nationalisms”. “It now has no other choice but to mobilize full force around this crisis”.

It’s not as though the European Union has been taken by surprise. “What are the values that will guide Europe in a world whose people are not standing still?” he said.

On Wednesday, European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker will present his latest proposal in a eagerly awaited speech in European Parliament. It’s reportedly led some refugees to take steps like burning off their fingertips to avoid detection by the EU’s fingerprint database for asylum seekers. “That’s why this problem concerns all of us in Europe”.

Germany, which expects to see a record 800,000 asylum applications this year, is calling for a central European Union list of safe countries of origin to which nationals can be returned and binding quotas for European Union member states to take in refugees.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s popularity has dropped abruptly over her handling of Europe’s refugee crisis, a poll for ARD television network showed. Sweden was one of very few European countries to pass through the war relatively unscathed. “This does little to ease the burden on those states hosting the most in need”. Europe’s overall unemployment hovers at 9.5%, with countries like Italy posting youth unemployment above 40%. And while ISIS is the media’s villain in this ongoing news story (and rightfully so), too often the Syrian government’s brutality goes amiss as they have killed seven times more civilians than the heinous terrorist group has.

What, in turn, are the “roots” of the crises in these countries which have given rise to this “catastrophe”? “If they want to, they can”.

That won’t cut it with Germany, whose munificence comes with a price tag – and a veiled threat.

“If nobody sticks to the law, then Schengen is in danger. We will need to go further”.

Britain, which had pledged to admit only 1,000 refugees, is now revisiting its policy. “If they are already in western Europe, they send information back to us to help us navigate the route”, he said.

The term has been used since April 2015, when at least five boats carrying nearly two thousand migrants to Europe sank in the Mediterranean Sea, with a combined death toll estimated at more than 1,200 people (http://news.eud.adventist.org/all-news/news/go/2015-04-20/migrant-boat-disaster-in-the-mediterranean/66/).