A new poll shows that despite Germany’s left-wing government pushing for more migrants, a majority of the public either rejects or strongly rejects higher levels of immigration.
The Nov. 3 poll from Germany’s public news outlet Tagesschau asked respondents if they were worried “that too many people were immigrating to Germany,” with 53 percent saying they have a “very big” worry or a “big” worry, while 44 percent are either a little worried or have no worries at all.
Worries about “too many migrants” may only grow over the coming months, with October recording the biggest number of asylum applications since 2016. As reported by Remix News, 12 out of 16 German federal states have already shut down all intake processes for new refugees in September due to strains on housing, schools, and social services. Since then, the situation has only deteriorated.
The Bavarian minister of the interior and chairman of the conference of interior ministers, Joachim Herrmann (CSU), said in September:
“In Bavaria, the accommodation options for asylum seekers are increasingly at full capacity, but Bavaria is currently still open to receiving (asylum seekers). However, there are still many Ukrainians in the shelters who fled to Germany in the first months after the outbreak of war. The new federal government massively pushed admission programs to capacity bottlenecks.”
Herrmann also criticized the government’s pro-migration stance, saying, “It cannot be that the federal government accepts more and more people but then leaves the states alone to deal with the tasks.”
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Germany has accepted approximately 1.1 million migrants so far this year, with the vast majority of them coming from Ukraine. However, hundreds of thousands have also arrived from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa — all groups that typically have a poor integration record in the country. Due to a growing housing shortage, Berlin is now expected to propose the construction of a massive tent city to house 4,000 migrants.
The German government has made a number of proposals not only designed to increase migrant numbers but also to speed up the citizenship process and provide a massive amnesty to illegal immigrants. These are all moves that will only further drive more people to enter the country by any means necessary, including through the service of human smugglers.
The German government is also pushing Italy’s new conservative government to accept all boat migrants from the various NGO vessels operating off the Italian coast. Many of these boats are flying German flags, with Italy arguing that Germany should thus be responsible for taking the migrants in.
“If Germany believes that there is a humanitarian problem, it should take care of it. Italy cannot become the refuge of all immigrants,” said the Minister for Relations with Parliament Luca Ciriani.
The same poll from Tagesschau shows the Social Democrats have 19 percent of voter support, the Christian Democrats are at 28 percent, the Greens are at 19 percent, and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is at 14 percent. While AfD’s strong criticism of immigration has likely accounted for part of the party’s rise in the polls — given that 53 percent of Germans have “big” or “very big” concerns about immigration — the party still has a long way to go to win over a majority of voters.
