German Interior Minister Jan van Aken has expressed his support for accepting climate refugees in Germany. “I am very in favor of granting asylum to people who are fleeing the consequences of climate change” he told the Funke Media Group’s weekend editions. “The climate catastrophe is already making entire regions uninhabitable, such as in Pakistan or Bangladesh.” Within the next 20 to 30 years, dozens of millions of people will have to flee because they can no longer live in their current areas.
When asked if he was in favor of unlimited immigration, van Aken replied, “There is always a limit of endurance, but is it in Germany 100,000, one million, or ten million migrants a year? After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, more than a million war refugees came to us. That is a completely manageable number. We can handle it.”
Many municipalities, he added, “are doing well and would be happy to take in more asylum seekers – but are not receiving any more allocations.” “Other municipalities have their difficulties. But that is not because too many refugees are coming. Our cities and communities are being torn apart.”
The fatal knife attack in Aschaffenburg, he said, “is not an asylum issue at all.” “It’s about how our society handles known mentally ill violent offenders. Some are admitted to closed psychiatric institutions, others are not. And mistakes are made there.”
He denies that there is no security problem in Germany. “However, we must also acknowledge that in the past 20 years, violent crimes in Germany have continued to decline” van Aken said. “The subjective sense of uncertainty also has to do with the fact that the debate is always being hyped up again.” Politics could have led the debate on handling mentally ill violent offenders after Aschaffenburg, instead of always shouting, ‘The migrant is to blame.’