Moving to outflank the fences and walls of Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, people smugglers are now inserting their customers into Germany from the unguarded East.
The border between Germany and Poland, now totally open thanks to the Schengen borderless internal zone is becoming increasingly busy with illegal traffic as smugglers avoid Germany’s fortified southern borders. German newspaper Die Welt reports the smugglers and their charges are hard to miss in Polish border town Slubice, where the illegals are driven up to the border and then left to walk into Germany, unstopped and unchecked.
A leaked police paper has outlined the extent of the problem, which it claims is exacerbated by a “significantly reduced” number of police assigned to patrol the frontier, with many redeployed to man immigration stations along the southern border. The report claims there were 114 illegal crossings “detected” across the Eastern border in May, in addition to an unknown quantity of migrants who slipped by unnoticed.
The report lamented “the border to the East is completely open!”, and that the smugglers “laughed” at the few border guards left.
The problem of invisible migration brought by the migrant crisis is one the German government is presently trying to wrestle with, as they attempt to assess just how many people are actually in the country. The latest academic estimate of the figure puts totally undocumented illegals — those with which the German government has no contact or control over whatsoever — as around half a million.
The invisible illegals are a particular problem for Germany’s police because they cannot find legal employment or access state benefits, and therefore rely on crime for sustenance.
German politician Wolfgang Bosbach said no one should be surprised by the development. He remarked: “It was foreseeable that the smugglers will try to offer the refugees new routes to Central Europe”, and that now the Balkan route was all but closed off migrants would predominantly now come through “Libya to Malta and Italy, or by land by Eastern Europe and Poland”.
Mr. Bosbach explained the reasons for the migrant crisis across Europe was very simple, blaming open borders internally and hardly protected European external borders. Comparing it to Berlins’s underground railway, he said: “when we abolished ticket inspections on the S-Bahn, then you discover no more fare dodgers. But then you check the statistics again and read the numbers back, the actual number of dodgers rises”.
