Germany needs to send a message to the world that it’s reaching the limit of its capacity to help Europe’s flood of migrants, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said yesterday, as he advocated restricting family reunions for Syrian refugees.

Germany has become a magnet for people fleeing war and violence in the Middle East. It expects 800,000 to a million refugees and migrants to arrive this year, twice as many as in any prior year.

“We need to send a clear message to the world: we are very much prepared to help, we’ve shown that we are, but our possibilities are also limited,” Mr Schaeuble said in an interview with ARD television.

The pace and scale of the influx has put pressure on local communities and opened a rift among the ruling coalition parties over the best way to handle the crisis. The divisions re-opened over the weekend, after Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said in future Syrian refugees would receive modified refugee status and be barred from having family members join them, a statement he later retracted.

The Social Democrats (SPD), who share power with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives, rejected that proposal. Schaueble, however, spoke out in favour of the measure and said it was a proposal that the government was examining in detail.