Germany is now offering to pay Middle Eastern and North African countries to take back migrants who have fled the war-ravaged and poverty-stricken regions.
“We had to find ways to stop illegal migration,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said during a recent trip to Ethiopia, the Washington Post reported.
Merkel’s statement comes after her country has already taken in thousands of refugees, a move that has become less popular over time. And with Merkel facing re-election next year, the German leader is now reversing her plans to welcome refugees with open arms.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel gestures as she poses before a TV interview on the migrant crisis with public broadcaster ARD, on February 28, 2016 in Berlin. Merkel said during this interview that the EU cannot allow Greece, a country bailed out from its huge debt crisis, to plunge into "chaos" by shutting European borders to refugees. (Rainer Jensen/AFP/Getty Images)
German Chancellor Angela Merkel (Rainer Jensen/AFP/Getty Images)
In January, TheBlaze reported that more than 1,000 men, said to be asylum seekers, stormed Germany on New Year’s Eve and committed various alleged crimes. The men were reported to have committed sexual assaults, robberies and at least one case of rape.
And in June, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Many experts have pointed to a populist uprising and increased concerns on immigration in the U.K. and other parts of Europe as contributing factors in the historic referendum.
Back across the pond, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump for months has offered a strikingly similar message to the one Merkel is now giving.
Meanwhile, Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton has stated a much softer position on accepting refugees and asylum seekers into the country.
“I will not let anyone into our country that I think poses a risk to us,” Clinton said at the Oct. 9 presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis. “But there are a lot of refugees, women and children — think of that picture that we all saw of that four-year-old boy with the blood on his forehead because he had been bombed by the Russian and Syrian air forces.”
Clinton has said that, if elected president, she would allow the U.S. to take up to 65,000 refugees compared with the 10,000 the U.S. has already agreed to take. Clinton’s proposal amounts to a 550 percent increase in how many refugees the U.S. would accept.