Hosting Refugees to Cost Germany Up To $3.7 Billion in 2016

Germany is ready to accommodate refugees, but the move will cost the country from 1.8 billion to 3.3 billion euro ($2 billion to $3.7 billion) in 2016, Andrea Nahles, the country's Federal Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, said Tuesday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The costs will primarily include security and social expenses, German language courses, assistance in finding a legal job, and social benefits for the unemployed, the minister was quoted by the German online news magazine FOCUS as saying.

These costs are likely to increase to around seven billion euro by 2019, the minister forecast.

In August, the German Interior Ministry said it expected 800,000 asylum seekers and refugees to arrive in the country by the end of the year, a figure almost four times as many as in 2014.

Earlier in the day, a fresh portion of 2,500 refugees from Hungary and Austria arrived by train to southern German cities of Munich and Rosenheim.

Germany is one of several EU countries reeling from the rapidly escalating migrant crisis, as hundreds of thousands of people flee their homelands in the Middle East and North and Sub-Saharan Africa in the hope of finding refuge in the European Union.

Amid the massive refugee influx, the country has witnessed a wave of anti-immigration violence. On Sunday, the mayor of the east German town Heidenau, where major anti-migrant protests had taken place, received violent threats from far-right radicals after opening a center for asylum seekers.