130,000 asylum seekers disappeared last year, according to German figures
Government figures show 13 per cent of recorded asylum seekers did not arrive at the shelter they were assigned to
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Your support makes all the difference.Official figures reveal 130,000 asylum seekers have seemingly vanished after initially being registered in Germany.
Around 1.1 million displaced people were registered through the ‘Easy System’ last year in the European country.
But officials have admitted 13 per cent of the recorded asylum seekers did not arrive at the shelter they were assigned to.
This means the whereabouts of roughly 130,000 people is unknown, with The Local reporting the Interior Ministry as suggesting some may have “slipped into illegality”, or ended up in different countries.
Previously they were quoted as saying some may have travelled to stay with relatives in other German cities.
The numbers were released in the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) after Die Linke, or the Left Party, put in an official request to parliament.
They illustrate how hard it is to accurately estimate how many refugees are in the country – and where they are now.
Since 2015 more than a million people have spilled into the country after fleeing war-torn areas.
But the government is facing a logistical nightmare as it tries to keep tabs on them all, with the latest figures also showing the ‘Dublin Accord’ has crumbled.
Under the measure asylum seekers are sent back to the EU country where they were first registered, which German authorities previously executed with efficiency, with every fifth person returned in 2014.
Last year that number had slumped to just one in every 10.
And with the system working both ways, Germany successfully requested 3,600 people to be taken back to their point of origin into the EU.
But with other countries putting in their own requests for Germany to take back their original asylum seekers, successful in 3,000 cases, there was a net migration out of the European powerhouse of a paltry 600 people.
Ulla Jelpke, of Die LInke, was quoted as saying: “The Dublin system is not only a bureaucratic nightmare, it’s a human one too - it creates uncertainty for refugees in need of protection and it demands an enormous amount of manpower at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees and in the courts.”
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