RUTHFULLY YOURS

In one of the most shocking flip-flops in recent political history, German Chancellor Angela Merkel now says she will deport about 10% of recently arrived migrants — 100,000 of them.

But more than that, her tone on granting asylum to migrants has radically changed.

Sunday Express:

The beleaguered Chancellor said authorities would significantly step up the rate of forced returns as she battles to arrest an alarming slump in her popularity which has fuelled a surge in support for the far-right.

Mrs Merkel, whose decision to roll out the red carpet to migrants from across Africa and the Middle East spectacularly backfired, has taken an increasingly tough tone on immigration in recent months.

And in her toughest rhetoric yet the German leader told MPs from her party this week: ”The most important thing in the coming months is repatriation, repatriation and once more, repatriation.”

The stance marks an astonishing U-turn from the once pro-refugee Chancellor, who has been widely pilloried by critics at home and abroad for her decision to throw open Germany’s borders to millions of migrants.

Her extraordinary change of heart has been prompted largely by a series of catastrophic local election results for her ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, which was trounced by the populist Alternative fur Deutschland in both her home state and the capital Berlin.

The party’s slumping poll ratings have sparked alarm amongst her allies in both the CDU and its coalition partner, the Christian Social Union (CSU), with talk that senior officials would try to oust her.

MELBOURNE, Australia—Some of the hundreds of refugees being held in Australia-backed Pacific island camps are to be resettled in the U.S. under a one-time deal between the countries.

The U.S. government has agreed to accept refugees being held in Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Sunday. Mr. Turnbull didn’t disclose how many were likely to resettled by the U.S. or on what terms, but he stressed the arrangement wouldn’t be repeated or be extended to asylum seekers not already in the camps.

The conservative government has maintained a tough line on asylum seekers who have sought to cross the dangerous waters between Asia and Australia but has moved to empty the offshore immigration detention centers that critics have called Australia’s “Guantanamo Bay.” Negotiations in recent months with various countries to resettle the refugees became more urgent in April when Papua New Guinea’s highest court ordered the closure of Manus, ruling that hundreds of asylum seekers were being held there illegally on Australia’s behalf.

Mr. Turnbull said it had fallen to his government to “stop the boats,” close onshore Australian detention centers and remove children from detention. The deal with the U.S. to handle refugees being held offshore adds to earlier arrangements with Papua New Guinea and Cambodia to accept asylum seekers from the camps.

“Our priority is the resettlement of women, children and families. This will be an orderly process [and] it will not be rushed,” Mr. Turnbull said of the U.S. deal.

The process with the U.S. is due to begin in the coming days and will be administered with the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR. U.S. authorities will conduct their own assessment of refugees and decide which people would be resettled in the U.S., and refugees would need to satisfy standards for admissions, including health and security checks, the Australian government said. CONTINUE AT SITE

Between 2005 to 2014, Germany welcomed more than 6,000,000 people.

Two essential questions about integration must be put on the table: 1) What do we ask of newcomers? And 2) What do we do to those who do not accept our conditions? In Europe, these two questions of integration were never asked of anyone.

In the new migrant order, the host population is invited to make room for the newcomer and bear the burden not of what is an “integration,” but the acceptance of a coerced coexistence.

“No privileges are granted to the Europeans or to their heritage. All cultures have the same citizenship. There is no recognition of a substantial European culture that it might be useful to preserve.” — Michèle Tribalat, sociologist and demographer.

“We need people that we welcome to love France.” — French Archbishop Pontier, Le Monde, October 2016.

When “good feelings” did not work, however, the authorities have often criminalized and prosecuted anti-immigration critics. The Dutch politician Geert Wilders is currently on trial for trying to defend his country from Moroccan immigrants whose skyrocketing crime wave has been transforming the Netherlands.

Everyone now knows — even German Chancellor Angela Merkel — that she committed a political mistake in opening the doors of her country to more than a million migrants from the the Middle East, Africa and Asia. It was, politically, a triple mistake:

Merkel may have thought that humanitarian motives (the war in Syria and Iraq, the refugee problem) could help Germany openly pursue a migration policy that was initially launched and conducted in the shadows.

Europe’s migration crisis may have reached a turning point. With populist and far-right parties on the march across the Continent, mainstream European leaders are starting to listen to voters’ concerns about absorbing more than a million newcomers from the Middle East and Africa. It’s about time.

One sign came Sunday, when the German Interior Ministry called for aggressive interception of refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa. “The elimination of the prospect of reaching the European coast could convince migrants to avoid embarking on the life-threatening and costly journey,” an Interior Ministry official told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

The Mediterranean crossing from Libya to Italy is one of two major routes used by migrants to reach Europe, and it is by far the more perilous. With revenues down, smugglers are stuffing more would-be migrants aboard unseaworthy boats for a crossing on choppy waters that can take several hours. One in every 44 doesn’t make it.

Even so, some 164,000 crossed through the Libya-Italy route this year. The German proposal could dramatically reduce that number by rerouting intercepted migrants back to African countries such as Egypt and Tunisia. Currently, intercepted boats are towed to the Italian coast. Once rerouted, the migrants would be allowed to apply for asylum through legal channels.

This model, which we have long championed, has the benefit of imposing order on a chaotic situation. It also reduces the incentives for the smuggler business model, since the traffickers’ clients—the migrants—will understand that they are wasting their money and risking their lives in vain.

Which brings us to the second migrant route, from Turkey to the Balkans via the Greek islands. About 170,000 have arrived via the so-called Western Balkan Corridor so far this year, and here, too, there are signs that European officials are getting serious. To wit, Austrian Defense Minister Hans Peter Doskozil over the weekend warned that a Brussels deal with Ankara to intercept migrants may not last, and that European governments must be prepared to police EU borders on their own.

BERLIN—German police detained an asylum seeker suspected of plotting an attack for Islamic State, the federal prosecutor’s office said Thursday, the latest evidence of a mounting terror threat posed by the arrival last year of hundreds of thousands of migrants into the country.

The 27-year-old man, identified by federal prosecutors as Ashraf Al-T., allegedly received approval from an ISIS operative in Syria to carry out an attack on Germans in the near future, the prosecutor’s office said.

The man was taken into custody in Berlin late Wednesday, and his apartment in the city’s Schöneberg district was searched, according to the prosecutor. By the end of the day Thursday, the suspect will go before an investigating judge with the federal supreme court, who will decide if there is sufficient evidence to keep holding the man.

The nationality of the suspect who arrived in Germany in 2015 remained unclear. Police initially identified the man as Syrian but an official familiar with the case said he might in fact be a Tunisian who used Syrian identification.

The arrest adds to escalating tension in Germany over the security risks arising from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to open the country’s doors to nearly 900,000 asylum seekers in 2015 alone.

As the wave of migrants entering the county peaked late last year, authorities brushed aside suggestions that the surge could include attackers linked with ISIS. A year later, a lengthening list of arrests and a series of attacks by refugees have led officials to reassess the threat and raise alarms about security.

“It is very good [that] this man was taken off the streets,” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said. “Security services had been watching him for some time.”

Officials said it was still unclear how far along plans were for an attack but authorities still felt compelled to act, said Bernd Palenda, head of the state intelligence agency in Berlin.

“As we had no overview over the risks—what might be done and when it might start—we acted fast,” said Mr. Palenda, CONTINUE AT SITE