Shelters for migrants fill up across Germany as attitudes toward them harden

Dozens of people from around the world lined up on a sunny morning this week in front of a former mental health hospital in Berlin to apply for asylum in Germany. “This is much more than we expected last year.” The former mental health hospital in Berlin’s Reinickendorf neighborhood was turned into the city’s registration center for asylum seekers in 2019 and can house up to 1,000 migrants. Berlin’s state government says it will open a hangar at the former Tempelhof airport to make space for migrants, put up a big tent at the asylum seekers’ registration center, and open a former hardware store and hotels and hostels in the city to provide 5,500 more beds for more migrants the city is expecting will come through the end of the year. On Wednesday, Germany’s interior minister announced that the country would increase border controls along “smuggling routes” with Poland and the Czech Republic to prevent migrants from entering illegally. In June, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz defended plans to stop migrants from entering the EU altogether until their chances of getting asylum have been reviewed, arguing that the bloc’s existing arrangements on sharing the burden of asylum seekers among the different European countries is “completely dysfunctional.” Germany has been taking in more migrants than most other European countries, but those efforts still pale in comparison with countries such as Turkey and Lebanon, which shelter millions of migrants from Syria.