German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said that processing asylum claims outside the EU could be a "building block" but will not significantly change the situation facing Germany.
Efforts such as Italy's proposed deal to send asylum-seeking migrants to Albania would not be a "game changer" for asylum policy and wouldn't make a major impact on the number of people seeking asylum, Faeser said on Thursday.
Some German politicians have been pushing the country to pursue a similar plan in hopes of reducing the number of asylum-seeking migrants in the country.
In Albania, "a maximum limit of 3,000 refugees has been agreed there. That is a very small number," Faeser said on Thursday while meeting with interior ministers from Germany's 16 federal states.
She also pointed to the United Kingdom, which has been working for 18 months to launch a similar deal to send refugees to Rwanda. Faeser said those efforts still haven't yielded a viable model.
Instead, Germany needs to rely on recent reforms to the common EU asylum system, GEAS, to handle migrants. She cited the possibility of faster asylum procedures at the EU's external borders and a fairer distribution of refugees among EU countries.
"These external border procedures ... will massively relieve the burden on us here," Faeser said.
