MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The German government expects some 3.6 million refugees to arrive in the country by 2020, local media reported Thursday, citing the German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.
In order to plan the economic development of the country, "purely technical assumptions were made about migration, coordinated among the governmental agencies," the ministry said in a statement, as quoted by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.
According to the paper, at the moment it is impossible to calculate the exact future migrant inflow, so there is no official forecast from the government.
Germany has become a key destination for hundreds of thousands of refugees and immigrants fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and North Africa since the start of 2015. The country’s interior ministry estimates that Germany received around 1.1 million migrants last year alone.
