More Migrants Crossed the Mediterranean to Europe in 2016 than Ever Before

More migrants crossed the Mediterranean to Europe in 2016 than ever before and Germany in particularly is inundated with a backlog of nearly 450,000 asylum applications.

The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees said that they plant to reduce the numbers by this spring, reported Germany’s Rheinische Post.

“About 100,000 of them are very specific and protracted cases where there are no documents or we need more information from abroad,” said an official with Germany’s federal office to Bild newspaper.

The average processing time for applications filed between January and November 2016 was close to seven months, up from five months in 2015, according to the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel.