Will Germany soon be ALONE with its lax migration policy?
More and more countries in Europe are demanding tougher border protection at the EU’s external borders. And even now making their own migration turn!
After all, many countries are reaching their capacity limits. In 2022, almost one million asylum applications were made in the EU, Switzerland and Norway – more than at any time since 2016! The EU interior ministers had therefore discussed the ongoing migration crisis in Brussels.
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (52, SPD) said: “It cannot be that we are only talking about the borders being raised around Europe.” Instead, she called for a “common asylum system” with “fair distribution”.
In plain language: Germany’s interior minister wants to overcome the crisis with solidarity instead of measures – but with the loose migration course Germany could soon be alone.
Other countries are already cracking down.
Sweden
▶︎ One “new course of severity” announced Sweden’s Migration Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard (41). Criminals and people with an “unsatisfactory” lifestyle (e.g. drug abuse, prostitution, contacts with extremists) should be deported more quickly.
Sweden has been working on a migration turnaround for months. For example, more than 80 percent of the influx of refugees is to be reduced, from 2024 residence permits without exception will be limited and residence permits that have already been granted will be revoked more easily. The requirements for citizenship are also to be tightened considerably.
Austria
▶︎ Especially Austria’s chancellor calls for a hard line in EU migration policy. In the BILD interview, Karl Nehammer (50, ÖVP) raises the alarm, calls for a border fence on the EU’s eastern border. The fence should be as safe as the border between the USA and Mexico – built by the then US President Donald Trump (76).
Great Britain
︎ Great Britain’s Interior Minister Suella Braverman (42) is also proposing a new change in migration policy with a draft law: Migrants who have entered the country illegally should no longer be able to apply for asylum. And not only that!
In the case of illegal entry, detention for 28 days without a judicial review should take place – and then: deportation!
Excluded from this: people under the age of 18, people in poor health and asylum seekers who are at risk in their country of origin.
Italy
▶ Italy is tightening its laws against illegal migration and the life-threatening business of people smugglers. The right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (46) announced: smugglers and backers face prison sentences of up to 30 years if accidents involving fatalities occur during irregular crossings!
France
▶ France recently signed a migration pact with Great Britain to jointly curb illegal migration across the English Channel.
The deal: London wants to pay France 540 million euros over the next three years in order to jointly stop human trafficking and prevent migrants from continuing their journey. For this, more French police officers will be active at the borders and on the water.
Additional security forces, helicopters, drones and sniffer dogs are increasingly deployed on the French side.
Greece
▶ The Greek government has been expanding the country’s border protection since the refugee crisis of 2015 – especially in the direction of Turkey: A steel fence now consistently separates the countries from each other. Now the government wants to build a new border fence along a 35-kilometer stretch of the Evros River. A 37.5-kilometer-long steel fence has already been built in recent years along another, shallow section of the border river.
The tough goal: no one should enter Greece illegally!
The Greece-Turkey border in September 2021: A Greek police officer patrols the steel fence on the border, which has been expanded for years – and is now to be massively expanded
Germany’s migration policy is SO lax
Currently, the traffic light government does not have the political goal of limiting the flow of immigrants. Likewise, no measures have yet been taken to reduce illegal migration to Germany, as Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser largely rejects temporary border controls in particular.
Faeser also rejects the plans of the EU interior ministers to use visas as a means of exerting pressure on countries of origin in order to enable deportations. Instead, migration incentives are set, for example through the planned easing of naturalization rights. The government also recently abolished the asylum rule review, which checks whether the reasons for asylum continue to exist or whether the asylum seeker has to leave the country.
Manuel Ostermann (32), Deputy Head of the German Federal Police Union, to BILD: “With the migration policy intentions of the federal government, Germany will continue to isolate itself within Europe.”
The migration course without “targeted measures” is “in the truest sense of the word a special path that nobody will rightly go with,” says the police unionist.