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German MPs toughen asylum rules to ease influx

German lawmakers have passed new restrictive rules for asylum seekers, streamlining the deportation process as Europe's biggest economy faces a major influx of applicants.

Published: 18 January 2024 22:15 CET

German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser talking in the Bundestag on Thursday. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Kay Nietfeld

As a bitter migration debate roils the country and the far-right AfD hits new heights in the polls, Olaf Scholz’s unpopular centre-left-led government championed the measures as a means of curbing new arrivals.

“We will ensure that people without the right to stay will have to leave our country faster,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said of the draft law “to improve repatriations” on Thursday.

Faeser said sending those without a right to asylum back to their countries of origin would free up resources for those most in need of refuge.

The tough measures give the police new powers to search for those ordered to leave the country and to establish the identity of migrants.

In addition the maximum amount of time people may be held in pre-expulsion detention will increase to 28 days from 10 currently to allow authorities more time to organise deportations.

Rights groups attacked the hardened policy as inhumane and excessive, with the Association of German Lawyers calling it “hardly in the realm of proportionality”.

“We are horrified that people who are fleeing and those who offer them humanitarian aid can be threatened with prison sentences,” sea rescue group SOS Humanity said.

The legislation sets out tougher penalties for people-smuggling, whether or not the helpers are paid.

However it includes language limiting prosecution to assistance on land, which the coalition says will exempt NGOS that aid migrants at sea — a claim some charities dispute.

The government estimates the bundle of measures will lead to an addition 600 deportations per year.

Faeser noted that firmer implementation of existing policy had last year created a 27-percent rise in deportations to 16,430.

MP Katina Schubert of the far-left Linke party accused the government of pandering to the political fringes with its harder line.

“Those who declare the small number of people who are actually obliged to leave the country to be a problem and criminalise charity sea rescues are doing the business of the extreme right,” she said.

A surge in arrivals in recent months, mainly from Syria and Afghanistan, has reignited a fierce immigration debate in Germany, with local authorities saying they are overwhelmed by the number of asylum seekers.

On the back of such concerns, the anti-migration AfD’s poll ratings have soared to around 22 percent, well ahead of Scholz’s Social Democrats at 14 percent.

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With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced on Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.