Migration policy under Merkel: No intact immigration country

Only recently did a topic flicker again that - depending on the survey institute - is almost as important to Germans as climate protection or the workplace: migration.

The reason was the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, which is not very suitable for bringing the country a peaceful future or even prosperity.

It is more likely that the already continuous movement of refugees will increase the more power the Taliban gain.

But Afghanistan is only one source of conflict among many.

Most asylum applications are made by Syrian citizens.

However, the greatest attention is still directed towards the Mediterranean Sea and the smugglers' migration route across Africa to the north into the unknown.

The Balkan Route is again what it was.

Although the number of asylum applications and immigrants is far below those of the crisis years from 2014 to 2017, too little has happened since then to be able to trust that such a situation will not repeat itself.

But that has been asserted again and again since then.

You cannot rely on Turkey - and neither on the EU

Lithuania is currently experiencing how quickly this can change; Turkey cannot be relied on; and in North Africa, especially in Libya, an order has never been established that breathes the spirit of international conventions. That is not even the case within Europe. The Eastern Europeans have been in the pillory since 2015, but Italy is now also considered a candidate who does not abide by European law. The number of EU states in which there are conditions that cause German administrative courts not to send asylum seekers back to where they should be accommodated according to EU law is growing.

All of this is based on grievances that have been known for decades but have not been remedied. The most recent attempt by Germany as the migration magnet in the center of Europe to bring the EU states to a new, joint approach to asylum policy has also failed. Horst Seehofer's proposals for a European asylum regime can be found in the Union's election manifesto not as a report of success, but as a declaration of intent.

The other parties did not think of too much that was new.

A migration ministry that the Greens want to set up continued the well-known “division of labor”: the Greens, the Left Party and the SPD are pushing for an immigration policy that is as liberal as possible, as they are now calling for a ban on deportation to Afghanistan;

The CDU, CSU and FDP, on the other hand, play the skeptics who can easily be discredited morally.

Uncontrolled migration as a big bang

A promising line does not emerge from this. Rather, all six parties act in such a way that they are quite happy to be able to avoid the topic. Since the high expectations in the population - some want a welcoming culture in every relationship, others want more control and even isolation - are contrary, migration policy has not been seen as a “winning issue” for years, at least not among these parties. This gives the AfD, as radically wacky to extremist as it may now be, the opportunity to achieve a respectable result in this federal election.

The state-sponsoring parties pay a high price for this.

As the fallow migration policy burns from two ends - on the one hand the European rift, on the other hand nationalist radicalism - they accept that the political landscape is becoming more and more complicated.

After all, it is not climate protection or the pandemic that are the reasons why calculations are now only made in alliances of three and four or in grand coalitions and a country like Thuringia has become almost ungovernable.

The big bang of this development was and is uncontrolled migration with everything that goes with it, which is often referred to as exaggerated when it is not about clan crime.

A great error and a grave oversight

The legacies of the Merkel era therefore include a great error and a grave oversight.

The fatal error consisted in not being able to completely control borders and thus immigration (that suddenly sounds very different in the Corona crisis).

The failure consists in the fact that immigration, which Germany urgently needs, could never be pushed in such a way, despite improved conditions, that one could speak of an intact immigration country.

There is no such thing as “right” or “wrong” immigration.

But there is a right and a wrong migration policy.

The wrong one has divided the country (not only, but especially in West and East) along a simple stance: Immigration, yes - but not like that.

After 2015, Chancellor Merkel no longer had the strength or authority in Europe to change anything in Germany's interest. In the election campaign, however, there is currently no candidate for Chancellor who would have the strength or the authority to articulate this interest in an acceptable manner for a large majority of voters. This is a permanent mortgage for social peace in Germany.