Germany agrees new measures to stem flow of migrants

Some 40% of Germans want Chancellor Angela Merkel to resign over her refugee policy, a new poll suggests. It showed 45.2 percent believed Merkel’s refugee policy was not a reason for her to resign.

The agreement means citizens of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia will have little chance of gaining political asylum, echoing steps Germany took for several Balkans countries previous year.

Renzi and Merkel both said European Union countries need to address the problems in refugee camps outside Europe to help stem the flow, increase Europe’s exterior border security, and do what is possible to fairly share out those who deserve asylum.

“We must fight illegality”, combat human traffickers and avoid migrant deaths at sea, Merkel said at a Berlin press conference with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.

CSU leader and Bavaria’s premier Horst Seehofer asked from the government to limit number of refugees Germany receives to 200,000 annually, and he warned that the Bavarian government will go to the Constitutional Court if the federal government would not change its policy.

He also said the incident was the latest in a series of attacks.

The deal with Morocco and the extension of the list of safe countries are also addressed at public perception, as many north Africans were among the alleged sexual aggressors in Cologne and other German cities on New Year’s Eve.

Sweden, which has tightened border controls as it struggles with the influx, on Thursday said it may reject nearly half of the 163,000 asylum seekers who entered the country a year ago.

Germany, Europe’s most populous country and its largest economy, has borne the brunt of the continent’s biggest refugee influx since World War Two.

This most recent Insa poll, conducted for Focus magazine, represents a complete switch from Merkel’s popularity ratings just a year ago, which is when she received Time Magazine’s Person of the Year award for her progressive stance on refugees.

The Finnish government expects to deport around two thirds of the 32,000 asylum seekers that arrived in 2015, Paivi Nerg, administrative director of the interior ministry, told AFP.

Support for her conservative bloc has drastically slipped with growing concerns as to whether Germany will have the capacity to integrate the 1.1 million migrants who arrived in the past year.

The proposed laws will affect all asylum cases that have been approved since mid-November 2015, with each individual case to come under review after three years to determine whether the protection granted by Austria is still warranted.

Last week, the European Union’s top migration official Dimitris Avramopoulos told lawmakers that efforts to manage the refugee crisis were failing and that the ongoing deadlock threatened unity in Europe.