According to CSU boss Markus Söder, there were 80,000 hits in the Bavarian border security
Source: dpa/Sven Hoppe
IIn the fight against unregulated migration to Germany, Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder is calling for stricter border controls. “All countries with external borders should follow our example with the border police – and the federal government should also increase its border controls,” said the CSU chairman of the “Bild am Sonntag”. The balance of the Bavarian border security is positive, he said: 80,000 hits within five years, “including human traffickers, drug dealers and other serious criminals”.
Actually, there are no stationary identity checks at the borders in the Schengen area, to which 26 European countries belong. In recent years, however, several countries have used an exception and have partially reintroduced border controls.
Germany has been controlling in Bavaria on the border with Austria since tens of thousands of refugees and other migrants made their way from Greece to Western Europe via the Balkan route in autumn 2015. Only Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) can order and extend such controls, not individual federal states.
The demand for temporary controls at the borders with Poland and Switzerland caused heated debates at the federal and state interior ministers’ conference (IMK) in the middle of the month. Saxony’s Interior Minister Armin Schuster (CDU) had demanded that the internal border controls be adapted to the current situation and extended beyond Bavaria. He pointed out that almost twice as many irregular migrants have been found on the German-Polish border for about three months as on the border with Austria.
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