Merkel's Party Seeks to Stem Tide of North African Arrivals

Chancellor Angela Merkel's party Monday said Germany should declare Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia "safe countries of origin", making it easier to reject asylum requests by its nationals.

The conservative party's proposal comes as Germany, struggling with a mass influx of 1.1 million asylum seekers last year, has also seen arrivals spike from North African countries.

And it follows public outrage over a rash of reported sexual attacks and robberies against women on New Year's Eve in the western city of Cologne blamed on North African and Arab migrants.

Party leaders made the proposal Monday, said Peter Tauber, general secretary of Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), who rule in coalition with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD).

The idea would need the backing of the lower house, where the CDU-SPD alliance has a crushing majority, and in the upper house, where SPD and Greens party-led states would also have to agree.

Tauber demanded a "speedy outcome", arguing that the three nations can all be considered stable.

Last year Germany declared six Balkans countries safe -- Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia -- meaning their citizens have very little chance of being granted asylum in Germany.

Tauber pointed to sharply reduced asylum requests by people from those countries and said adding the three North African nations to the list was "appropriate and necessary".

Welt am Sonntag newspaper reported a day earlier that Merkel and Bavarian state leader Horst Seehofer had agreed that Algerian and Moroccan asylum seekers should no longer be put in shelters throughout the country.

Instead, they would be housed in existing expulsion facilities in Bavaria until their claims have been heard, similar to current practice for applicants from Balkan countries.

Germany has said it wants to free up resources to help people fleeing war-ravaged countries such as Syria, who made up about 40 percent of those who arrived last year.

The numbers of Algerian asylum seekers coming to Germany rose to 2,296 in December from 847 in June, while those from Morocco jumped to 2,896 from 368, the interior ministry said.