For generations of walled-in West Berliners, Tegel Airport was the gateway to the world. Two years after the airport closed, Tegel’s temporary reactivation in March as a Ukrainian reception centre now looks permanent.
With new white tents popping up here daily, new EU asylum figures on Wednesday showed the continent is experiencing its highest influx of people since 2015.
“We still have the people from Ukraine but now more people are coming from elsewhere and that creates additional pressure,” said Detlef Cwojdzinski, Berlin’s leading refugee crisis manager, on a visit to Tegel.
Already this year Berlin has accepted 100,000 people, breaking records set during the 2015/2016 refugee crisis.
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Volunteers in Tegel say several hundred Ukrainians are arriving weekly and they have been told to expect an additional 600 people from Syria and Afghanistan by the weekend.
No one here knows where to put the new arrivals. The Tegel facility was intended for more than two nights but Ukrainians who have arrived in the last weeks are still here in white, winter-proofed tents because they have nowhere to go.
Sounding the alarm during a visit to the former airport on Wednesday, Berlin’s social senator Katja Kipping announced a tender to build a tent city on the former airport taxiway.
“It’s a herculean task to manage this, we will need at least 10,000 new places,” she said. “Creating these places is damn hard work, but this is damn well our duty.”
On Wednesday the EU Asylum Agency (EUAA) said “unusually high numbers of asylum applications” had arrived in the last months. Some 84,500 asylum applications have been filed this year in the EU’s 27 member states along with Norway and Switzerland. In addition about 255,000 people, almost all Ukrainians, have applied for some form of temporary protection.
“Taken together, asylum applications and registrations for temporary protection have surpassed five million in 2022 so far,” noted the EUAA.
Even as Russia’s war in Ukraine continues, the EUAA figures show nearly one-third of the applicants in August were from Syria and Afghanistan, where huge numbers are fleeing the reinstated Taliban regime.
Poland announced on Wednesday that 7,610,000 people from Ukraine had crossed its border since February 24th, with 19,400 arriving on Tuesday alone. Some 5.8 million have returned from Poland to Ukraine since February, the Polish border agency reported, with about 1.3 million Ukrainians still in the country.
“At the moment, the situation is fairly stable and, in truth, the number of refugees from Ukraine in Poland is not rising notably,” said Mariusz Kaminski, Polish interior minister. “Hopefully it won’t be necessary for further thousands or millions of our neighbours from Ukraine to seek refuge outside their own country.”
Back in Germany asylum is organised at state and local level with new arrivals settled according to a distribution key. But 16 federal state leaders have been warning since September that they are at breaking point.
In protest, some cities have closed their doors until Berlin’s federal government makes available new funding and logistical help.
As well as an accommodation squeeze, municipalities say the arrivals are straining to breaking point local medical care and other services.
Rising in parallel to the new arrivals are the number of attacks on German asylum accommodation: 65 to date in 2022, already as many for all of 2021.
The most recent attacks have included suspected arson attacks on homes for Ukrainian refugees in eastern Saxony and the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
No one was injured in either attack, but federal interior minister Nancy Faeser said that “if arson is confirmed, it is an inhumane crime that will be prosecuted with full severity”.
Meanwhile the Swiss border service has come under scrutiny after a weekend television report broadcast footage of officers in Basel apparently accompanying men from Afghanistan, Tunisia and Morocco to specially-reserved compartments on trains heading to Germany and France.
Switzerland is one of 31 signatories to the Dublin Agreement, which assigns asylum applicants’ cases to the signatory country they first entered.
In a television interview Karin Keller-Sutter, a member of Switzerland’s ruling federal council, denied claims the country is “waving through” migrants.
“Often it is the case that these people don’t file an application claim,” said. “Then there is no Dublin process.”
