MOSCOW9 (Sputnik) — The number of asylum seekers who have arrived in Germany since the beginning of 2015 has hit one million, Bavaria’s Social Minister Emilia Mueller said Wednesday, according to local media.
This number is based on the amount of migrant registrations processed by the EASY computer system, which is used to assign asylum seekers to German states based on their population and tax revenues, the minister told reporters, as cited by the German edition of The Local newspaper.
While data from the EU statistics office Eurostat puts the number of refugees who applied for asylum in Germany as of October at around 340,000, more than 200,000 people were added to the EASY system’s list in November alone, Mueller said.
The system’s data has been disputed by experts, with some arguing that actual number of arrivals is much higher, while others have suggested that the system overestimates the influx of refugees due to possibility of an individual being registered multiple times, according to the news outlet.
The news come two days after German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said over 950,000 people had received or applied for refugee status in Germany this year. He added that the initial forecast by the German government of 800,000 refugees arriving in the country in 2015 had been exceeded due to the intensified refugee influx since mid-August.
The European Union is struggling to deal with a massive refugee crisis, with hundreds of thousands of people leaving conflict-torn countries in the Middle East and North Africa for Europe, most of them trying to find refuge in Germany.
Over 1.2 million illegal border crossings have been detected by the EU border agency Frontex during the first 10 months of 2015.
Over half of Germans disapprove of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door policy on migration, according to an early November poll conducted by the ZDF channel. A rift within Merkel’s government emerged when Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere called for tightened border control to stem the migrant influx.