German Gov't Has Lost Track of 600,000 Migrants

Leah Barkoukis | January 23, 2016 5:17 PM

Last year roughly 1.1 million migrants traveled to Germany after Chancellor Angela Merkel rolled out the welcome mat. Now, however, there’s just one problem: the German government cannot account for 600,000 of them.

Via the Daily Mail:

The German government is unable to say where more than half of the one million asylum seekers allowed into the country have ended up, MailOnline can exclusively reveal.

Government statistics show that Germany registered 1.1million applications by the end of last year under its EASY system, which does not record much more than an applicant's country of origin.

German Interior Ministry spokesman Dr Harald Neymanns admitted that delays in the processing of asylum seeker applications would account for some of those missing.

But he also said that in some cases refugees may not have stayed in Germany but instead gone on to a different country elsewhere in the EU.

A third explanation is that the refugees may not have existed in the first place - because some asylum seekers have been found to apply multiple times in an attempt to get sent to the city of their choice.

EASY stands for Erstverteilung von Asylbegehrenden, which translates as Initial Allocation System for Asylum Seekers.

The system, operated by the German Ministry For Migration And Refugees, aims to provide urgent first assistance to new arrivals by spreading them around the country based on a quota system.

Once the country of origin is recorded for migrants they are then assigned a location where they are to be taken care of, and it is there they fill out their application for asylum. But the Daily Mail notes that of all the refugees that came in, only 476,649 of them have registered for asylum, meaning roughly 600,000 are essentially lost.

While this figure may be astounding, the U.S. is in no position to pass judgment. In 2015 alone, 500,000 foreign nationals who came to the U.S. legally have overstayed their visas, and DHS has no idea where they are. You’ll recall that five of the 9/11 hijackers were visa overstays.