TIRANA, Sept. 24 – More than 500 Albanian citizens are to be deported next week from Germany, after they were denied asylum in the northern European country, officials said.
“We are flying them in on a very regular basis now – just to show to everybody we really mean it when we say that there is no economic asylum, and I can only really, really, plead with people that they should give up this idea – to seek economic asylum – it does not really work that way,” Germany’s Ambassador Hellmut Hoffmann said in a Tirana Times interview this week.
Nearly 40,000 have sought asylum in Germany this year alone, constituting the second-largest group of people seeking asylum in Germany, trailing only Syrians.
More than 8,000 Albanians sought asylum in Germany in August alone.
Germany received the same number of applications from Albanians in all of 2014.
Albanians usually seek asylum because of dire economic conditions in their home country, not fear of persecution, which makes their claims invalid in the eyes of German law. All are to be deported, according to German officials.
The issue has also turned into a political one with the opposition accusing the government of deepening poverty and driving people away from the country.
Earlier this week, the main opposition Democratic Party head Lulzim Basha, in a posting on his profile on Facebook, published a Eurostat report on asylum seekers in EU countries.
“We rank the first in Europe, and third in the world after Syria and Afghanistan when it comes to the number of asylum seekers. It concerns the second quarter of 2015. Albanians become poorer while members of the government become wealthier,” Basha noted.
