Germany’s new leftist ‘traffic light’ coalition, which announced last week that the parties involved had reached an agreement to form a government, has promised to implement policies that will drastically increase immigration into Germany.
The incoming ‘traffic light’ coalition government—composed of the leftist Social Democrats (SPD), the far-left Greens, and the liberal Free Democrat Party (FDP)—has signaled plans to radically alter the pro-immigration policies of Angela Merkel’s outgoing government to facilitate even more migration into the country, Deutsche Welle reports.
The mechanism by which the new government, led by incoming Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD), plans to drastically increase migration is by enacting policies that will allow those who’ve already been granted official refugee status or subsidiary protection—a lesser form of asylum status—to bring their relatives to Germany, a process called chain migration.
From 2005 to 2017, the phenomenon known as chain migration—which the Democrats and Republicans have supported with their policies—has allowed more than nine million legal immigrants into the United States.
The newly formed coalition has also made it a priority to decrease the time it takes for asylum claims to be processed, and promised to create a “humanitarian corridor” for migrants fleeing countries, like those living under Taliban rule in Afghanistan.
Under the new coalition agreement, any migrant who’s been living illegally in Germany for at least five years is eligible to receive a one-year residency permit as long as they don’t have a criminal background. Additionally, legal migrants who’ve been residing in the country for as few as three years could be eligible to become naturalized German citizens.
The leftist, pro-mass migration coalition would also like to alter Germany’s current citizenship system so that migrants aren’t required to renounce citizenship from their home country in order to become naturalized German citizens.
In a press release published last Friday, the national conservative Alternative for Germany (AfD) sharply criticized the coalition’s proposed immigration policies, referring to it as a “declaration of surrender” which “opens the floodgates and promotes the abolition of Germany. Instead of putting a stop to illegal immigration, the coalition simply wants to legalize every possible abuse.”
“The alleged migration policy ‘paradigm shift’ of the [traffic light coalition] is in truth an intensified relapse into the catastrophic errors of the ‘welcome policy’ of Merkel’s unhappy remembrance,” AfD co-chairman Tino Chrupalla said.
“While our European partners are struggling to secure the EU’s external border, the new German government is kicking them in the back and inviting illegal migration. This policy will not only tear our country and its social systems apart but will also dangerously deepen the division of Europe,” he added.
