Germany to extend temporary border controls

German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser has said that the controls on people crossing into Germany at the border with Poland, Switzerland and the Czech Republic will be extended for a further two months.

Faeser told the German newspaper Rheinische Post that the measures which had been set to end on December 15 would continue until at least February, in an interview published on Friday.

"Our measures are working. Our fight against the unscrupulous business of people smugglers, who brutally jeopardize human lives, is successful," the Social Democrat minister said.

What border controls did Germany implement?

The measures — which were introduced back in October and extended to December 15 on Monday — saw extra police officers sent to the borders with the three neighboring countries to carry out checks on people seeking to cross.

The aim is to reduce the number of people migrating to Europe to enter Germany.

Although the Schengen Zone, of which all four countries are members, allows for visa-free travel between states, members have regularly introduced border checks to inhibit the movement of non-EU individuals — but specifically refugees — within the Schengen area.

Germany has carried out border checks on the border with fellow EU member state Austria since 2015.

Do the controls work?

The Ministry of the Interior said that some 9,200 unauthorized entries had been detected and another 4,370 had been prevented since the measures were introduced in October.

"This means that these measures are working and will continue to do so," a ministry spokesperson said.

However, one of Germany's main police unions, the GdP, was more critical of the measures and questioned how effective they were.

Andreas Roßkopf from the GdP told the Rheinische Post that police would not be able to significantly reduce the number of asylum-seekers.

It needs to be clarified "whether thousands of police officers should actually remain at the border or whether they would not be better deployed for security in the cities and the asylum problem solved within the EU framework," he said.

The number of asylum applications reached a new record of 35,000 in November, according to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees.

Germany requires continued migration to balance out its aging population and fill gaps in the labor market, but concerns about illegal arrivals have led to a surge in support for the anti-immigration far right. 

In response, the center-left coalition government has taken a number of increasingly drastic steps to reduce migration.

ab/nm (dpa, Reuters, EPD)

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