Thousands of Afghan citizens who have claimed asylum in Germany have flown back to their home country for a holiday before returning to Germany according to an explosive report by the German television channel RTL. The revelations shore up the argument made by anti-immigration parties that many of those seeking ‘refuge’ in Germany are actually abusing the asylum system and have only headed to Western Europe to gain social benefits.
The Afghans mentioned in the report have been able to return to Afghanistan with the help of so-called blue passports: these are handed out by German authorities to refugees who do not hold any form of identification from their home country. Around 60,000 Afghans in Germany have received such passports.
Blue passport holders do not have the right to travel to the country from which they fled. However, Afghans and travel agencies have been able to bypass the rule by applying for so-called “double entry visas” from Iran. This enables the migrants to deceive border officials at German airports by showing them their actual destination country as Iran.
Because the Iranian visas are not stickers that are stuck into the passport but are on a separate sheet of paper, the stamps of the border guards are not stamped in the blue passport but only on the sheet of paper, which can be easily disposed of before returning to Germany. The actual destination country—Afghanistan—is thus concealed.
This provoked Deutsche Polizeigewerkschaft police union deputy chairman Heiko Teggatz to criticise the government:
It is a mystery to me how a visa that is placed in the passport can be valid at all. If you drive to Austria and buy a motorway toll sticker, you have to stick it on the windshield and not just place it on the dashboard.
According to the RTL report, some migrants have been also scamming German authorities by flying to Afghanistan via Turkey.
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser denied that she or her department was to blame by saying:
It is not our job, but the job of the local immigration authorities, to make sure that something like this does not happen.
What makes the revelations particularly shocking is that Germany has classified Afghanistan as an unsafe country of origin, and has refused to repatriate migrants to Afghanistan since the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime took back power three years ago.
The paradox is that ordinary Afghan citizens, who are seeking “refuge” in Germany, don’t seem persecuted by the Taliban at all—and are happy to return home on holiday.
German politicians have in recent months been deliberating about whether to start deporting dangerous Afghan criminals back to Afghanistan. The debate was reignited by the murder in May of a police officer by an Afghan failed asylum seeker.
Afghan and Syrian migrants have been responsible for a spate of knife attacks in Germany in recent months. However, the German government has classified both Afghanistan and war-torn Syria as unsafe countries and rejects deporting failed asylum seekers there.
The government insists on “protecting” dangerous foreign criminals, despite the Taliban regime in Afghanistan saying it was willing to cooperate with Germany on deportations. Separately, a German court ruled last month that there is no longer a general danger to all civilians in Syria, which in theory means that dangerous Syrian criminals could legally be deported back to their home country.
There were close to one million Syrians, and more than 400,000 Afghans living in Germany at the end of last year. Syrians were the largest group of asylum seekers in 2024: around 38,000 applied for asylum, followed by 20,000 Afghans (the second-largest group).
Joachim Stamp, the German government’s commissioner in charge of migration, called for the deportation of Afghans who have asylum status in Germany but have gone on holiday to Afghanistan. “Germany must remain cosmopolitan, but not stupid,” he declared.
Bavaria’s Deputy Prime Minister Hubert Aiwanger called on Faeser “to stop this fraud immediately,” announcing that:
Anyone who comes from Afghanistan as an asylum seeker, for example, because he is allegedly persecuted there, and then goes back there on holiday, must immediately have their residence permit withdrawn and benefits completely cancelled.
The RTL revelation of holidaying Afghan refugees seems to have gone unnoticed by the human rights group Amnesty International, which criticised the German government for planning to reduce the financing of its program that enables many Afghans to enter Germany legally. Since the Taliban took power three years ago, Afghanistan has been subject to arbitrary justice, including torture and ill-treatment, Amnesty argues.
It seems holidaying Afghans don’t share Amnesty’s bleak view of their home country.
