Finnish Prime Minister Juha Sipila says he is ready to open his house for refugees, and they can move in on Jan. 1, 2016.

Sipila told Finnish broadcaster YLE Saturday morning that his family has a house in central Finland that they no longer use since moving to Helsinki.

Details of how to apply and how many people the house could accommodate weren't immediately available.

Last month, Finland's interior ministry said it expects that up to 15,000 people would apply for asylum in the country — 10,000 higher than previous estimates.

The leader of the Center Party, Sipila has been heading a center-right government since May.

No legal limit to asylum seekers

On the other hand, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said there is no legal limit to the number of asylum seekers her country can receive. Merkel told the Funke consortium of newspapers in an interview published Saturday that "the right to political asylum has no limits on the number of asylum seekers."

She says that "as a strong, economically healthy country we have the strength to do what is necessary" and ensure every asylum seeker gets a fair hearing.

But Merkel repeated her government's position that those migrants who stand no realistic chance of getting permission to stay need to be returned to their home country.

Germany has seen tens of thousands of migrants arriving each month, many of them refugees fleeing war and persecution in Syria, Eritrea and elsewhere.

Migrants arrive in Germany

In the meantime the first train carrying 167 migrants from Austria to Germany has arrived in Munich. Police say the train arrived in the Bavarian capital at 10:25 a.m. (0825 GMT). The migrants were among a larger group who had traveled by bus from Hungary to Austria.

Federal police spokesman Simon Hegewald told The Associated Press that a specially chartered train from Salzburg, Austria, with several hundred migrants on board was expected in Munich around noon.