The German left-liberal government is trying to get tougher on immigration after the knife attack in Solingen that left three innocent people dead and a country shocked and angered about the rise of crime among migrants. The steps may prove to be too little, too late, as anti-immigration parties look to dominate the upcoming regional elections in three eastern states.
After years of failing to address the root causes of the problem, the federal government, consisting of the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the liberal FDP, has announced new measures to toughen knife controls and curb benefits for some illegal migrants.
As we reported, a 26-year-old failed asylum seeker from Syria attacked festivalgoers with a knife in the western German city of Solingen last week, killing three people and injuring eight.
The knife attack is the latest in a series of similar violent crimes committed by mostly Afghan and Syrian migrants in recent months. According to a police report, “in relation to the total population, non-Germans are statistically six times more likely to resort to knives in an attack than German citizens.”
Following public outrage, the government has finally decided to take action—although the measures announced on Thursday, August 29th, seem more like a desperate attempt to show something is being done rather than attacking the root cause of the problem: a failure to stop illegal immigration.
First of all, announced Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, carrying knives at festivals, sports events, and other similar public events will be banned, with reasoned exceptions to the ban. Knives will also be banned on long-distance trains and buses, and police will be given more powers to search members of the public. There will also be a general ban on carrying flick knives.
Faeser had previously proposed limiting the length of knives that can be carried in public to 6 centimetres (from the current 12 centimetres). Critics have argued that people, not knives, are responsible for these heinous attacks, so a ban would not amount to much.
Police will also be allowed to use Tasers against violent offenders, and authorities will be empowered to carry out more rigorous background checks on applicants for weapons licences. Investigators will be allowed to use facial recognition software to identify terror suspects and employ artificial intelligence to analyse police data.
The Solingen attacker should have been deported last year but because the immigration officers couldn’t find him on the day they were supposed to collect him, authorities inexplicably decided to let him stay in Germany and granted him ‘subsidiary protection’ and further social benefits.
Justice Minister Marco Buschmann said on Thursday that “the entire process must be examined, must be made more effective, so that we can deport people more quickly.” Nancy Faeser announced that in the future, Germany would refuse benefits payments to migrants set to be deported to other countries in the European Union. In the case of the Syrian knife attacker in Solingen, he arrived in Germany from Bulgaria, which is the country where he should have sought asylum—and gotten whatever support that country provides.
Faeser also indicated that the government would try to “remove hurdles” to quicker deportations, and to work “intensively” to restart deportations to Afghanistan and Syria, especially with regards to Afghans and Syrians who have committed serious crimes. Deportations have been halted for several years due to the two countries being designated unsafe countries of origin.
Despite ongoing promises by Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his government to speed up deportations, of the nearly 250,000 people in Germany slated for deportation last year, only around 16,000 were actually deported.
There has also been outrage over the fact that thousands of Afghan citizens who have claimed asylum in Germany have flown back to their home country for a holiday. According to the government’s new proposals, refugees who travel to their home countries without compelling reason risk losing their protection status.
Perfectly timed to try to demonstrate that the government is already taking action, on Friday, August 30th, it carried out the first deportation of Afghans back to their home country since August 2021. “These were Afghan nationals, all of whom were convicted offenders who had no right to stay in Germany and against whom deportation orders had been issued,” a government spokesman said.
A chartered Qatar Airways flight bound for Kabul took off from Leipzig airport in the early hours of Friday, with 28 Afghans on board. The operation was the result of two months of “secret negotiations” in which Qatar acted as the go-between between Berlin and the Taliban authorities, Der Spiegel reported.
Each one of the Afghans, among them child molesters and gang rapists, received €1,000 in cash, prompting conservative publication Junge Freiheit to comment:
This story will spread quickly in Afghanistan. And the story will not be that Germany has started deporting people, but that it is financially beneficial to attack women and children in Germany. No, a government cannot sink any lower.
The failure of the government to address all the above-mentioned problems will surely manifest itself in the strengthening of anti-immigration parties at this weekend’s regional elections in the eastern German states of Saxony and Thuringia.
Right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and left-wing Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) are projected to win between 40 and 50% of all votes—a huge blow for establishment parties, including the centre-right CDU, who have contributed to a huge influx of immigrants in the past decades. Following the Solingen attack, co-leader of the AfD Alice Weidel called for a stop to immigration for five years.
