Lara Trump, President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law and 2020 campaign adviser, asserted on Thursday that Germany’s acceptance of migrants was “the downfall” of the country.
“It was the downfall of Germany ― one of the worst things that ever happened to Germany,” she told Fox Business Network, referring to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door policy. “This president knows that. He’s trying to prevent that from happening here, but Congress has got to get their act together and do the right thing here for the American people.”
She made no mention of the nation’s involvement in either World War I or II, or its descent into Nazi rule.
In 2015, Germany received a record-breaking 2.14 million immigrants, marking a 46 percent increase from the previous year, according to data from its Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. The largest group by far were from civil war-ravaged Syria, which led to the highest number of refugees seen since World War II. Other migrants accepted by Germany had fled Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
In a 2017 report, Amnesty International ranked Germany as the top refugee-hosting nation in all of Europe and the seventh worldwide.
Backing the president’s attempted immigration crackdown, Trump slammed lawmakers for what she felt was a failure to take action.
“The fact that Congress has not addressed what is going on on our southern border has been detrimental not just to our country, but it’s threatening peoples’ lives every day because people have incentive to try and come here and a lot of them die or are injured along the way,” she said.
Though Europe handled an increase in migrants from 2015 to 2016 as Syria continued to spiral into crisis, the number of registered first-time asylum-seekers dipped dramatically in 2017 and 2018, European Union data shows. At its highest, the number was more than 1.25 million, falling to less than 581,000 in 2018.
However, that’s not because of a lack of asylum applications. Throughout the past two years, the number of applicants has fluctuated somewhat, but acceptance rates dropped significantly, partly due to the implementation of additional restrictions.