Almost 1 mln refugee arrivals registered in Germany by Nov.
Xinhua, December 7, 2015 Adjust font size:
Nearly 965,000 refugees have arrived in Germany from the beginning of 2015 to the end of November, said German Interior Minister Thomas De Maiziere here on Monday.
This already exceeds Germany's official prediction which said 800,000 refugees were expected to come to Germany this year. Around 206,000 refugee arrivals were registered in the month of November alone, according to De Maiziere.
More than half of the newly-arrived asylum seekers so far this year came from Syria, followed by Afghanistan and Iraq.
A total of 425,035 asylum applications have been submitted till the end of November, well below registration numbers, due to the fact that many refugees have to wait some time before they can apply for asylum as large numbers of refugees continue to arrive in Germany.
The number of unprocessed asylum applications has continued to grow. There have been 355,914 unprocessed applications at the end of November.
De Maiziere noted that the speed of processing asylum applications would accelerate in the coming months, referring to yet another 4,000 jobs created with the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) in response.
The worsening weather, he added, has led to a significant reduction in the number of refugees coming to Germany in the last two weeks. The minister did not make a forecast for the year as a whole. However, media and think tanks estimated that over one million would arrive based on the current figure. Endit