>Villagers in a tiny, rural area of Lower Saxony in Germany, are demanding answers after it transpired that their village with a population of just a few hundred will be forced to accept one thousand migrants due to Angela Merkel’s decision to throw open her country’s borders.
>A packed public meeting was held last night in Sumte to discuss local concerns over the migrant influx and Spiegel Online reports that it didn’t go well.
>It began with the mayor and local officials expressing utter surprise that anyone could possibly be worried by so many newcomers. “I did not expect so many interested residents,” the mayor began as an official from the Lower Saxony Ministry of the Interior looked on. Uproar followed.
>“How do we protect ourselves against crime?”was another question. A woman asked “if medical care is guaranteed for the protection of all of us”. From a corner of the hall somebody pointed out that there were mainly single, young men arriving on the town’s doorstep and would it be safe to leave the house after dark. Oh yes, the mayor assured them, “the street lights will remain on all night”.
>In Lower Saxony, the pressure to find accommodation is strong, the Interior Ministry explained to the meeting. Last year, almost 19,000 asylum applications were received, in 2015 there were already more than 75,000. Homes had to be found and the tenor of the meeting was that anyone who opposed that flow was xenophobic.
>“Thousand are just too many”, resident Dirk Hammer told the meeting. His family has lived for 400 years in the village. He wants as many as a “reasonable solution” would allow to “minimize disruption” but ultimately the feelings expressed were that residents were not consulted and now they were being forced to accommodated over 1,000 people in a village that has never been home to more than 100.
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