The massive cost of a single refugee to German taxpayers

Some 700 German politicians, as well as administration and refugee organizations met two weeks ago in the city of Lübeck for the second refugee conference in the country to plot a new policy on migrants for the coming year.

The average expenditure to feed and clothe each person, provide language lessons and schooling and the care of unaccompanied minors, may even be higher as the calculation does not include training courses, the costs to the taxpayer to deport failed would-be migrants or rampant criminality.

Germany will have taken in around 1.3 million refugees by the end of the year in the last 18 months. In a single day, more than 2 200 migrants were rescued in the Mediterranean and 10 bodies were recovered, Italy’s coast guard reported.

The International Organization for Migration says that 159 496 people had reach Italy by sea this year and 4 220 died trying – a sharp increase from 3,777 in the whole of 2015.

The sharp rise has prompted Germany’s Interior Ministry recently, as FreeWestMedia reported  to consider tougher Australia-style policies.

But the partial solution for European countries grappling with an influx of people who have fled conflicts in Syrian and Africa, was met with the usual hysteria from the Left with the UN and Amnesty International, displaying their usual drive towards dismantling sovereign states.

Right-wing European politicians have praised Australia’s system as a realistic one, but open border ideologues have attacked the proposition as “inhumane”.

The German Interior Ministry suggested stopping migrants from ever reaching Europe’s Mediterranean coast by picking them up at sea and returning them to Africa, the Welt am Sonntag newspaper reported a fortnight ago.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats are leaking votes to the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and need to be seen as more responsive to voters’ concerns.

But the United Nations’ top human rights envoy slammed the Australian model as “cruel, inhuman and degrading”. The Wall Street Journal quoted François Crepeau, the UN special rapporteur on migrant human rights, who said the “punitive” approach Down Under was “unraveling”.

“Australia has seen the cost of this,” Crepeau raged at the end of his inspection of a refugee centre on the island Nauru, but could only highlight the “political” and “reputational cost”, both of which Crepeau eagerly perpetuated with moral grandstanding.

Successive Australian governments have defended their very effective policies – although costly – as necessary to deter criminal trafficking of vulnerable refugees.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s conservatives want an agreement with the US to take refugees from Costa Rica before the Obama administration leaves office in January, to fall through, but Crepeau expressed hope that “probably before Mr Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration” the repatriation would take place and continue after.

Most of the Australian-held asylum seekers come from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran and Sri Lanka.

Crepeau said Australia’s human rights record had been “damaged” by its very effective migration policies to keep unwanted newcomers out. ”Australia would vehemently protest if its citizens were treated like this by other counties and especially if Australian children were treated like this,” Crepeau whined. He did however not explain why Australians would need to leave a well-run, safe country.