More and more districts and municipalities feel overwhelmed with the admission of so-called refugees. Even the Greens are now resisting: Tübingen’s Lord Mayor Palmer and the Green Miltenberg District Administrator Scherf have written a letter to Chancellor Scholz (SPD) in which they call for a reduction in the number of refugees and warn of the threat of cuts in services.
The refugee situation is overburdening more and more municipalities because the accommodation options are exhausted in many places. Boris Palmer, Mayor of Tübingen, together with the district administrator of the Bavarian district of Miltenberg, Jens Marco Scherf (Greens), turned to Chancellor Scholz. They demand a reduction in the number of refugees for municipalities and propose a “catalog of concrete measures”.
In their catalog of measures, the two local politicians “propose pragmatic solutions in the areas of accommodation and the housing market, administration, social, school and professional integration services, childcare and medical care based on concrete experiences”. For example, they demand that refugees who are not in need of protection should not be distributed to the municipalities in the first place. Refugees without a right to stay should only be allowed to receive benefits in kind and remain in the reception facilities of the federal and state governments. There must also be changes in the accommodation, because “the priority accommodation of the refugees” has already reached a critical size, “which leads to noticeable displacement effects, especially in lower income groups,” says the six-page paper that the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” present.
Palmer and Scherf warn: “Either it will be possible to structure and control migration and thus significantly reduce the number of refugees entering the municipalities again, or there will be a risk of cuts in services, which will either affect the entire population that is dependent on the respective services, or affect the group of newly immigrated persons.”
Boris Palmer has already commented publicly on talk shows on the refugee debate several times, but many of his points of view are rejected by his party – his membership in the Greens is suspended until the end of 2023 due to internal disputes of migration policy (and thus make few friends in their own ranks).
It gives a little hope that even some Greens have now arrived in reality. Control and containment of immigration is more than overdue: Slowly the woken “We have space” bawlers should become aware that the boat is full.