Posted on February 26, 2019

Germany Fails to Deport Nearly Every Second Asylum Seeker

Reuters, February 24, 2019

Germany failed to deport 27,000 rejected asylum seekers last year, nearly half of the total 57,000 cases, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said on Sunday, adding that the government would step up efforts to get those migrants out of the country.

Seehofer, a member of the Bavarian sister party of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives, is one of the sharpest critics of her decision in 2015 to open Germany’s borders to more than 1 million refugees.

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Seehofer told Bild am Sonntag newspaper that the 27,000 rejected asylum seekers could not be deported because they had no travel documents or police could not find them. Some resisted deportation at the airport, he added.

The government plans to restrict the rights of failed asylum seekers who lied about their identify or who are deemed a security threat, by establishing a new form of “preparatory detention” before deportation, Seehofer said.

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Nearly every second company in Germany hired a refugee under a vocational job training contract in 2018, up from only every third company in 2016, a survey by the Economy Ministry and the DIHK Chamber of Industry and Commerce showed.

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