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BERLIN: German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives and her Bavarian allies have agreed on a plan to set up "transit zones" at the border to filter out migrants who clearly have no chance of gaining asylum, Bavarian Premier Horst Seehofer said on Monday.
Seehofer, who heads the Christian Social Union (CSU), sister party to Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), said a concrete proposal would be drawn up by the two parties, the Bavarian government and the federal government, this week.
However, the Social Democrats (SPD), the junior partner in Merkel's national coalition, expressed strong reservations.
With its relatively liberal asylum laws and generous benefits, Germany is a magnet for many of the hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
While Merkel insists that Germany can cope with the influx and will benefit from it, communities around the country are struggling to house and support the refugees, and the CDU has slipped in opinion polls.
Bavaria, the point of entry for many of the thousands who reach Germany each day, said on Friday it was at the limit of its capacity.
A draft bill already circulated by the CDU-run Interior Ministry provides for transit zones to hold refugees at land border crossings so that asylum requests can be examined before they are allowed in.
The bill, which Reuters has seen, says this will allow those whose applications are inadmissible or clearly unfounded to be turned back.
This would affect people without papers or with fake documents, migrants from countries deemed "safe", or those who do not present sufficient reason to justify an asylum request.
However, if a decision could not be made within a week, or accommodation could not be provided at the border, the migrant would be allowed in anyway.
Critics say that what is possible at an airport is not easy to replicate along a land border more than 3,500 km long.
SPD Justice Minister Heiko Mass spoke of "mass holding camps in no man's land".
"To detain tens of thousands of refugees at the border will cause more problems than it solves," he told the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
Thomas Oppermann, head of the SPD parliamentary group, said in a statement that the plan was "impossible to implement in practice, and wrong in human terms".
The German government still officially expects 800,000 new arrivals in 2015, while media have quoted internal government papers saying up to 1.5 million people could come.
Reuters
