EIn a fire letter to the Hessian state government, the local politicians of the Main-Kinzig district complained about the “enormously unequal distribution” of the refugees and too little help from Wiesbaden and Berlin. “We have reached our limits in terms of capacity,” says a letter sent by District Administrator Thorsten Stolz (SPD) and the heads of the town halls of the 29 towns and municipalities in the district to Prime Minister Boris Rhein and Interior Minister Peter Beuth (both CDU) and the responsible persons Minister of Social Affairs Kai Klose (The Greens).
“It’s not the people that are the problem. The problem is the lack of living space,” complain the representatives of the largest district in Hesse. They predict that the situation will continue to deteriorate in the winter months. “It’s no longer the displaced people from Ukraine, but asylum seekers from other crisis regions for whom we now have to build massive accommodations.”
Because this fact is not noticed, the advances made by the Ukrainian army in the war have now sparked citizens’ hopes for an end to the influx of refugees. Not only the clubs wanted to use their halls again, which served as emergency accommodation. Private individuals also reached the limits of their ability to help. The population no longer understands “making venerable areas and buildings usable for refugees”. The construction and upgrading measures of the municipalities would be “fended off and delayed more and more aggressively”.
Frankfurt is preferred
For these additional efforts, the politicians are demanding counter-financing from the state; but it must also create more of its own accommodation options. “Get people in the right mood for the current crisis situation,” the letter, which was declared “confidential”, continues. It contains two pages on which the local politicians criticize the system used by the country to distribute the refugees. A comparison with the city of Frankfurt shows that the intake target for the Main-Kinzig district is disproportionately high. With 759,000 inhabitants, this has a noticeably lower admission obligation than the district with only 423,000 inhabitants.
“The unequal treatment becomes even clearer if the admission obligation is further broken down,” said the local politicians. “The Main-Kinzig district takes in 16.1 people per 1000 inhabitants, the city of Frankfurt 9.” How these figures come about is undisputed between the Ministry of Social Affairs and the Main-Kinzig district.
How many refugees are assigned to the municipalities is determined by the State Admissions Act and a relevant ordinance. According to this, the individual admission quotas are initially based on the respective number of inhabitants. If it is at least 400,000, the acceptance rate is 8.5 percent. There is no other higher level. That is why the same quota applies to the Main-Kinzig district and Frankfurt, although the city has 336,000 more inhabitants.
A higher proportion of foreigners means lower allocations
The local politicians are in favor of abolishing the system of stages and instead billing “pointed”, i.e. always taking the specific population figures as a basis. Then the Main-Kinzig-Kreis and Frankfurt would not be treated the same, but according to the different numbers.
The second important criterion is the proportion of foreigners in the resident population. The higher this already is, the lower the further assignments will be. In the Main-Kinzig district it is 16.8 percent. This leads to a reduction of one percent. Frankfurt has a proportion of foreigners of 30 percent and is therefore relieved by two percent when calculating the allocations.
Frankfurt also prefers this criterion, say the local politicians. Unlike in the Main-Kinzig district, for example, the “foreigners” there included a large number of EU citizens and migrants who had been living in Germany for decades. They are “de facto nationals”, but are treated like foreigners in the distribution system.
There are massive lawsuits not only in the Main-Kinzig district. As reported, the representatives of Wetterau have already vented their anger in an open letter to the federal and state governments.
