H.E. Mr. Matthias Höpfner:

Two questions were directly posed in my direction. The first was by yourself, Chairman, on the comments made by members of the German Bundestag that 30% of the refugees arrived from the Balkan region. Indeed, that is so. I mentioned the number of Albanians alone that form part of this refugee influx in Germany. As I have said, in our view, we have to come to terms with the definition of countries of safe origin and if these are countries of safe origin, then special visa procedures or immigration procedures would have to take place. We cannot accept citizens of such countries as refugees or asylum seekers if their countries of origin are seen as safe. We tend to believe this is at least generally the case because we have agreed to give them EU candidature status, or they are on their way in that direction. It would be contradictory to see them then as a persecuting country, at least in general.

In Germany there is an interesting discussion under way as to whether we should not introduce a new set of rules defining legal immigration. We are looking in the direction of Canada, for example, where I have also served as ambassador and where they have a very successful points system managing something like 250,000 immigrants per year. It is a political discussion in the direction that we should define possibilities of legal immigration. That would take some of the pressure from the refugee situation.

The second question was whether the explanation for the current German policy is that we need all these migrants for demographic reasons. Let me clearly say, this was certainly not the reason for the German approach. The reason was the immediate emergency, the immediate challenge to core values of the European Union, challenges to humanity and to solidarity.

Therefore, it is mainly a value-oriented approach. Immigrants from Syria, who in many cases have a good level of education and training, may become beneficial for Germany and our demographic numbers are not very different than in some other European countries. There can be beneficial effects but the immediate motivation was clearly value oriented.