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Germany registered 965,000 migrants through November

BERLIN — The number of people registered as asylum-seekers in Germany this year hit 965,000 by the end of November, well above a forecast for the whole year that was made less than four months ago, the country's interior minister said Monday.

Some 206,000 new arrivals were registered in November. That pushed the total for 2015 well above the 800,000 that Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere forecast for the full year in mid-August, a few weeks before the flow of people arriving via Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans accelerated.

With few other European countries prepared to share the burden, the influx has stretched Germany's capacity to find housing for migrants and process asylum applications. The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, which the government is beefing up amid mounting criticism of a backlog of paperwork, decided on 35,422 applications last month.

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De Maiziere said that the pace of new arrivals has slowed over the past week or two, with some 2,000 to 3,000 now arriving daily rather than 8,000 to 10,000 as was often the case in recent months.

"This isn't yet a turnaround, but it is a good development," with poor weather in the Mediterranean Sea and efforts by Turkey to stop crossings to Greece apparently contributing, he said.

Also on Monday, Austria started building a chain-link fence that will extend along a small part of its border with Slovenia. The 2.4-mile barrier on both sides of the Spielfeld crossing point south of the city of Graz is not meant to prevent migrants from entering Austria, but instead to regulate their crossing, officials said. Completion is planned by Christmas.

De Maiziere said the actual number of new arrivals in Germany this year is below 965,000, but authorities have not yet been able to determine how many newcomers might have been registered more than once.

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Associated Press