Germany’s federal parliament, the Bundestag, adopted the so-called Repatriation Improvement Act on Thursday, January 18th—a law designed to speed up the deportation of rejected asylum seekers. However, an amendment from the Greens makes it unlikely the law will actually make any noticeable difference.
Though Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in October that the government would begin “large-scale” deportations, the home affairs ministry has admitted that it does not expect an exponential rise in the number of deportations, only an increase of 600 people (a 5% rise) once the law is in force.
Thorsten Frei of the CDU reminded the government that 350,000 migrants applied for asylum in Germany last year, an increase of 44% compared to 2022, meaning the additional 600 deportations a year are insignificant compared to the 1,000 new arrivals per day.
The Repatriation Improvement Act will allow authorities more room for manoeuvre in detaining and deporting migrants. The law will extend the time period allowed for the detention of illegal migrants from ten to 28 days in order to prevent them from going into hiding. Police will also have extended powers to search for those ordered to leave, and to access their property, including smartphones.
“We will ensure that people who do not have the right to stay will have to leave the country quicker,” said Interior Minister Nancy Faeser. Right now, it can take more than two years to handle an asylum claim. The adopted changes hope to cut that to between three to six months.
However, the Greens—members of the governing left-liberal coalition—managed to dilute the law with their proposal that immigrants be supplied lawyers at public expense to challenge deportation decisions. This means that legal challenges to the deportations could continue for an even longer period.
Although the new law stipulates that migrants can be detained before being informed of their impending deportation, lawyers could hinder this process, because they themselves must be notified in advance of the detention of clients.
“This means that those who are obliged to leave the country will be long gone before being taken into custody,” said Alexander Throm of the opposition centre-right CDU, criticising the law.
Last year, 16,430 people were deported from Germany, an increase of 27% compared to 2022, according to data from the home affairs ministry. Most of them were returned to Austria, Georgia, North Macedonia, Moldova, and Albania. However, 31,770 planned deportations failed, meaning that only one-third of migrants were successfully returned. Reasons for the failures included medical exemptions, migrants not being found, and destination countries refusing to accept them.
Penalties for smugglers are to be tightened under the new law. However, due to protests by human rights organisations, the law includes language limiting prosecution to smugglers providing assistance on land, which will exempt NGOs that aid migrants at sea—even though NGOs have been accused of cooperating with people smugglers and encouraging migration.
As conservative publication Tichys Einblick writes:
One crucial factor is not taken into account: the high number of illegal migrants who are regularly rewarded with an asylum procedure, and in the end with protection status or a residence permit. In addition, there is an influx of people through family reunification: last year this number was 124,625, probably more than ever in a single year.
As we recently reported, nearly a million migrants have entered Germany through the country’s family reunification scheme since 2015. Family reunification for non-EU citizens is open to those with valid residency permits along with recognised refugees. At its party conference in September, the largest governing party, the social democrats (SPD) decided that family reunification for those entitled to subsidiary protection should be carried out to an unlimited extent, a move that prompted sharp criticism from the liberal FDP, its junior coalition partner.
In a move that further encourages migration to the country, the Bundestag on Friday passed a law that aims to ease the path to German citizenship. Immigrants legally living in Germany will be allowed to apply for citizenship after five years, rather than the current eight. This may even be reduced to just three years, if migrants are deemed to be especially well-integrated, have a good knowledge of German, do volunteer work, or have good grades in school.
Children born in Germany to at least one parent who has been living legally in the country for five years or more (instead of eight), will automatically get German citizenship. Adult applicants will have had to have been employed for at least 20 of the last 24 months to qualify.
Multiple citizenships will also be allowed, meaning tens of thousands of Turks, including third-generation immigrants, could acquire German citizenship and have the right to vote. To acknowledge their contribution to the country’s post-war reconstruction, the government has exempted them from providing proof of being well-integrated and being able to speak German, and—in contrast with others seeking German citizenship—they may even be unemployed, receiving state aid.
The governing parties called the newly agreed law something that “does justice to a modern immigration society and the principles of humanity and order.” “We have to keep pace in the race to attract skilled labour,” said Interior Minister Nancy Faeser.
However, the opposition is not so enthusiastic.
As we recently reported, the new law could expand voting rights to up to 2.5 million recent migrants, and the CDU has aired fears that the new arrangement could enable a potential Islamist bloc to attain parliamentary representation in the Bundestag. The general Turkish diaspora numbers approximately 7 million in Germany, with 1.5 million partaking directly in recent Turkish elections.
“German citizenship is something very precious, and one should treat it very carefully,” the CDU leader Friedrich Merz said. His party colleague Alexander Throm emphasised that “the government is not just changing a law, it wants to change our society.” The anti-immigration AfD spoke of a “sell-out” of their citizenship. “The German passport must be earned by providing serious proof of economic and cultural integration,” Mariana Harder-Kühnel of the AfD stressed.
According to the Federal Interior Ministry, around 14% of the country’s population does not have a German passport—that’s just over 12 million non-citizen residents of Germany, five million of whom have already lived there for at least ten years.
Immigration has been a hot topic in Germany in recent years, and the government’s failure to address the problem of illegal migration—while easing the path to legal migration—has contributed to the rise of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). According to polls, the right-wing anti-globalists are now the second strongest party with almost a quarter of voters supporting them.
Both CDU and AfD’s motions to limit or reduce the amount of state benefits asylum seekers can receive were rejected by the left-liberal majority of the Bundestag.
