SUHL, GERMANY—Thuringia has no say in how many asylum seekers come to the state—these are the words of Thuringia’s Minister for Migration, Doreen Denstädt, whose admission of helplessness says it all about the migration situation in Germany.
Eisenberg, Hermsdorf, and Suhl are small towns in the eastern German state of Thuringia, where reception centres for migrants have been overcrowded for months. Just like most parts of Europe, Germany has been facing an influx of asylum seekers this year: around 205,000 migrants applied for asylum between January and August this year, marking an increase of 77% compared with the same period last year.
Thuringia has had to share some of the burden.
“The refugees are assigned to us according to the so-called Königsteiner Schlüssel. We are not warned about the number of arrivals,” Green politician Doreen Denstädt recently said in an interview, amid the debate on migration. According to the aforementioned scheme, Thuringia has to accommodate 2.7% of all asylum seekers in Germany. The state housed 4,055 migrants in 2021, 6,199 in 2022, and 3,900 in the first half of this year.
According to the latest figures, the reception centre in Suhl—a town with a population of 36,000—is currently accommodating just under 1,400 people, although local officials say it is only actually possible to provide adequate care for 800 migrants at the centre. It was forced to close its doors to new admissions at the start of October when the number of residents reached 1,600.
The building is around three kilometres from the centre of the picturesque town—the migrants are purposefully placed on the edge of Suhl, so as not to disturb the locals, but it becomes clear on our arrival that they are free to walk the streets: we see mostly young men aimlessly wandering around, huddled in groups.
“It’s a permanent problem, they ruin the image of the town. There are tensions. A lot of young men, mostly from Northern Africa, come here, but not with families, like you hear in the media. People who live here feel they’ve been abandoned,” an elderly man tells us.
The feeling is shared by many of the inhabitants of the town and politicians likewise.
A recent survey conducted in Thuringia and neighbouring Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt found that 90% of people are unhappy with the migration policies. Minister-President of Thuringia (from the hard-left Die Linke party) Bodo Ramelow said the reception centres in his state had “reached their limit.” The mayor of Suhl, André Knapp, complained of the centres being “chronically overcrowded.”
“There are simply too many people, the asylum centres are overcrowded, not just here, but everywhere in Germany. We have enough problems of our own, this is something we cannot handle anymore. Everyone is upset, something has to be done,” a young man in Suhl told us.
German publication Focus recently wrote of 670 asylum seekers being accommodated in an industrial building in Hermsdorf—all of them men between the ages of 18 and 66, predominantly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Turkey; all of them travelling alone. The building was supposed to be used for emergency situations only, and house 200 people. However, the overcrowding of the facility has led to unhygienic conditions, and the centre had to stop admitting new arrivals after many migrants were found to have scabies, a contagious skin infection. “Large puddles of water were formed in the toilets, because the hall mostly houses men from cultural groups who wash their anal area with running water after using the toilet,” Focus reported.
As Hermann Binkert, founder and leader of the INSA polling institute in Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia, tells us, migration will be on top of the agenda and will focus heavily in next year’s state election campaigns in the eastern states of Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia. The anti-immigration national-conservative AfD is on course to win and receive a third of all votes.
“Migration is a huge problem not just in some states but in the whole country. It has to be dealt with quickly, a solution must be found as soon as possible,” says Hermann Binkert.
However, Bodo Ramelow doesn’t believe in securing Germany’s borders. The country’s leadership has reintroduced controls on its borders with Austria, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, and Poland in a bid to halt the influx of migrants. At the same time, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser has called for the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) to significantly curtail security checks of asylum seekers, which inevitably will act as a pull factor that encourages more illegal migration. “Deploying police in the Thuringian Forest just for show doesn’t provide results,” Bodo Ramelow stated, calling instead for other EU member states to take in migrants, and for registered asylum seekers to be forced to work after three months of arriving, so they could provide for themselves.
“If a few people come here, and they intend to study, work and be an integral part of our society, it’s not a problem. But if they want to live like they did for example in Pakistan, then it’s a big problem. There are just too many people. Our migration system isn’t working,” says Hans Pistner, the regional leader of the WerteUnion (Values Union), an association that considers itself to be the conservative wing of the centre-right opposition alliance, CDU/CSU.
The people of Suhl are clearly frustrated with the situation they find themselves in and tell us of rising crime rates in the town, and of elderly people being afraid to walk on the streets.
“The owners of the stores experience this on a daily basis, there is also a lot of trouble on the buses, some bus drivers simply don’t show up for work anymore,” says a middle-aged man.
The daily newspaper Bild recently reported that security personnel has been hired to accompany bus drivers for the past three years on the route from the asylum centre to the city centre. There have been cases of vandalism, fights breaking out, and drunk migrants abusing and threatening other passengers.
As an elderly woman in Suhl tells us: “If we allow the whole world to come here, people from completely different cultural backgrounds, it will inevitably lead to heightened tensions.
