A majority of Germans want the EU to stop asylum seekers from entering the bloc in an unauthorized manner but instead have refugees brought over directly from camps, according to a survey published by Welt Am Sonntag.
Fifty-nine percent of the survey’s respondents supported reconfiguring the bloc’s Common European Asylum System to “prevent asylum seekers from entering the EU illegally in the future,” and instead focus on bringing in “more vulnerable people directly from crisis regions.” Thirty percent of respondents were opposed to that scenario while 11 percent were undecided.
Following the 2016 refugee crisis, the European Commission put in place measures to reduce irregular migration but its formal proposal on the matter has been delayed several times, and a wider consensus on the bloc’s migration policy has eluded the Council.
While Southern European countries have called for greater solidarity among EU countries, Central and Eastern European governments have so far rejected efforts to get them to accept mandatory quotas of asylum seekers.
Earlier this week German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said that Germany would attempt to get EU members to reach a political deal on migration reform while Berlin holds the bloc’s rotating Council presidency, a period running until December 31.
Germany has been the EU member to take in the greatest number of asylum seekers from the Turkish refugee camps set up as part of a 2016 deal struck between Brussels and Ankara to stem the flow of refugees entering Europe, resettling 9,967 of the 26,835 migrants brought over, according to Commission figures cited by Welt.