Germany: Refugee influx continues despite border controls

BERLIN

More than 7,000 refugees arrived in Germany over the last 24 hours, amid reintroduced police controls across the Austro-German border.

German Federal Police said on Thursday that 7,226 refugees entered Germany on Wednesday; most are in the southern state of Bavaria, which borders Austria.

The Bavarian alpine town of Freilassing has become the new focal point of refugee influx in recent days, with thousands of asylum seekers trying to reach there from the neighboring Austrian city of Salzburg.

Hundreds of refugees marched along the highway to cross the Saalbrucke border bridge between Freilassing and Salzburg, after German and Austrian railways suspended services between Salzburg and Munich on Wednesday.

German border police stopped nearly 1,500 refugees at the border bridge, checked their travel documents and escorted them to refugee reception centers for registration.

Smaller refugee groups continued to come to Saalbrucke on Thursday and some 200 asylum seekers were still waiting for their registration, local media reported.

Bavarian public broadcaster BR reported that immigration authorities in the federal state registered 9,100 refugees on Wednesday, up from 6,000 on Tuesday.

Germany tightened its borders last week, after Hungary introduced harsher measures against immigrants, rerouting refugees to neighboring Austria to travel onwards to Germany.

Merkel: Refugees in, illegal migrants out

On Thursday, Chancellor Angela Merkel renewed Germany’s commitment to accept refugees escaping civil wars and political pressure, amid the continued influx.

However, she also vowed harsher measures against illegal economic migrants, who are accused by conservative and right-wing politicians of exploiting Germany’s social security system.

“We would like to help those who are in need of protection. But we must also tell those, who came here only for economic reasons, that they have to leave our country, so that we can help those who are in need of protection,” Merkel said during a speech at the IAA International Motor Show in Frankfurt.

Germany expects a record 800,000 asylum applications in 2015; four times last year's total.

The EU’s largest economy received 202,834 asylum applications last year; almost 47,000 of the asylum seekers were Syrians.

Top immigration official resigns

As Germany faces the growing refugee crisis, the country’s top immigration official unexpectedly resigned on Thursday.

The Interior Ministry announced that Manfred Schmidt, president of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, stepped down for “personal reasons”.

Schmidt had been president of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, BAMF, since 2010.

BAMF has been accused of failing to tackle a bureaucratic log-jam in the asylum system, and for not fairly and swiftly assessing asylum requests.