After months of wrangling, the federal and state governments reached an agreement on the future distribution of refugee costs. The federal government wants to pay a flat rate of 7,500 euros per capita, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) said early in the morning in Berlin at the end of the Prime Minister’s Conference. The decision document shows that the federal government intends to pay this annual flat fee to people applying for asylum in Germany for the first time.
The states have long demanded that the federal government contribute more financially to refugee costs – also pointing out that they themselves have no influence on the number of people who come to Germany.
Currently, there is a sharp increase in asylum applications. According to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, 233,744 initial asylum applications were lodged in Germany up until September this year alone – significantly more than in the entire previous year. Furthermore, Germany has taken in more than a million war refugees from Ukraine who do not have to seek asylum.
In mid-May, the federal government had already promised the states another billion euros for the current year. The objective is to support them in alleviating the burden on their municipalities and financing the digitalization of immigration authorities. But for some time now, states and municipalities have been pushing for a future so-called breathing system, in which payments are permanently based on the actual number of refugees.