Germany is facing difficulties in taking in more migrants, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on Wednesday.
“Germany, like Italy, is at the limit of its capacity,” Steinmeier said in an interview with Italian Newspaper Corriere della Sera, pointing out that Germany had received a third of all EU asylum requests in the first half of 2023.
The president acknowledged that both Italy and Germany had “heavy loads to bear” and called for a “fair distribution” of migratory burdens within Europe.
The migrant conundrum is only going to get worse as more and more places in the world become harder to live in. Climate change disasters bankrupt governments, record heatwaves crash worker productivity and raise societal tension, flooding destroys large swathes of previously usable housing, and social unrest follows, along with corruption and political volatility across the board.
And those people have to go somewhere.
Meanwhile, places that actually have resources and haven’t been hobbled yet by natural disasters and cultural upheaval - like Germany - just want to turn their backs, as if they don’t have anything to do with the problem and therefore have no responsibility for dealing with it.