The Chairman of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, welcomes the migration policy project formulated by the SPD, Greens and FDP to enable the so-called lane change.

This means a change for certain migrants from asylum to labor migration.

He "expressly" supports this, said Bedford-Strohm on Thursday at the presentation of a basic word by the two large churches on migration and flight entitled: "Shaping migration in a humane manner".

Tobias Schrörs

Political Editor.

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The first migration word appeared more than 20 years ago.

In the second document, which is more than 200 pages long, the churches are calling for “a more active naturalization culture”, as the deputy chairman of the German Bishops' Conference (DBK), Franz-Josef Bode, said.

Political scientist Hannes Schammann said that the paper provides a perspective that does not think migration is fearful-nationalistic or based on benefit calculations.

It is about life in a migration society, which Germany has increasingly understood since the noughties, and the related debates about cohesion, security as well as economy and welfare.

The authors also emphasize that the church itself is shaped by migration.

The word migration deals with migration as a topic of the Christian faith, which is shown, for example, in the story of the Exodus. After all, the paper aims to provide a socio-ethical orientation. It should be a "migration ethical compass", said the theologian Marianne Heimbach-Steins. Two principles were roughly: Nobody should be forced to emigrate from their old homeland. As well as: everyone should be able to immigrate to a new home.

On the Catholic side, the Archbishop of Hamburg, Stefan Heße, is actually responsible for the issue of migration in the Bishops' Conference.

In the autumn, shortly after the Pope rejected his resignation, he was re-elected as chairman of the migration commission.

However, he did not take part in the performance.

The DBK justified this with the fact that Heße only wanted to gain a foothold in Hamburg.