Half of Germans against Merkel serving fourth term

“But even then, we would not have conditions like a year ago”.

It had widely been believed that 1.1 million migrants entered Europe’s biggest economy in 2015 after fleeing war and poverty in their home countries.

Frank-Juergen Weise told a newspaper that his office would struggle if more people came.

“We are preparing for between 250,000 and 300,000 refugees this year”.

“We’ll present the exact number soon but it’s certain that less than one million people came to Germany a year ago”, he said.

According to the International Organization for Migration, 2,901 people have died or disappeared crossing the Mediterranean in the first six months of 2016, most along the unsafe central route to Italy – a 37 percent increase over last year’s first half, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday urged people of Turkish origin living in Germany to take part in German society and not to bring conflicts taking place back in Turkey to Germany.

He said his agency had made major strides in working through a large backlog in asylum claims but that it would not manage to clear the remaining 530,000 cases by the end of the year.

“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.

Her open-door immigration policy, which allowed a huge influx of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere into Germany, has been blamed for a series of violent attacks on civilians last month, two of which were claimed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terrorist group.

A poll published Sunday by Bild am Sonntag found that 50 percent of respondents opposed a fourth term for Merkel, should she decide to run again in 2017.

Mr Weise said the country would attempt to find employment for all its new arrivals, but added the job of fully integrating the refugees “would take a long time and cost a lot”.