German Development Minister Gerd Müller has announced a new initiative to encourage migrants to return to their home countries as a new report has revealed that up to 21,000 deportations failed last year.

The new scheme, which follows a previous scheme that gave migrants cash incentives to return to their home countries, will see the German government spend up to €500 million on financing jobs and skills programmes in the migrants’ home countries, Deutsche Welle reports.

Minister Müller argued the programme was not “putting a check in anyone’s pocket” and added that it would only be “financing projects on the ground”. Müller also announced that the government had already begun a partnership with Siemens which has promised to help train around 5,000 asylum seekers who are returning to Iraq in engineering related fields.

The government scheme hopes to encourage between 20,000 to 30,000 migrants to voluntarily return to their countries of origin.

While some migrants voluntarily return, many others remain in the country despite failing their asylum claim. Of those, many are put up for forced deportation but a new report from Germany’s Bild newspaper has revealed that 20,869 deportations failed to happen last year.

German Pilots Stop 222 Deportations as They Refuse to Take Migrants Home https://t.co/vm2SJ1J6sg — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) December 8, 2017

9,200 deportations failed simply because the migrants had disappeared and could not be found by police, had medical certificates excusing them from travel, and in 314 cases, pilots refused to take them onboard their aircraft.

In total, 25,673 deportations were carried out by the German Federal government last year which has faced opposition not only from far-left pro-open borders activist groups but also from regional governments with ruling left-wing coalitions.

Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, leader of the Bavarian Christian Social Union and a key ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, has said he will increase the number of deportations in the coming year. One of Seehofer’s promises has been the construction of new deportation centres to prevent migrants from going underground and avoiding authorities.