A centre for 506 asylum seekers is to be set up in Rott am Inn, a village in Bavaria with a population of around 4,000 people. The residents are outraged. They have been protesting continuously for many months. “Mr Söder, you have the power to stop this,” reads a poster from a local citizens’ initiative. Markus Söder is the Bavarian Chancellor for the CSU, who has repeatedly stressed that the influx of illegal migrants “must be significantly reduced”. In 2023, more than 350,000 people applied for asylum in Germany. This represents an increase of 51.1% compared to the previous year (217,000). Chancellor Olaf Scholz then promised accelerated deportations, but nothing came of it. Migration has once again become a hot topic of debate following the recent knife attack in Solingen and the parliamentary elections in Thuringia and Saxony, where the AfD won twice as many votes as all the parties in the ruling coalition (SPD, Greens, FDP) combined.
Elections will be held in Brandenburg on September 22, and the AfD is also leading in the polls there. That is why the government and the opposition Christian Democrats are competing with each other in proposals on how to solve this problem. In order to reduce the number of people entering Germany without a visa, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser has already ordered the extension of temporary controls at all German land borders. She also announced a “new model for compliance with European law and effective rejection of migrants at the border”. This was a condition for the CDU’s participation in today’s immigration summit in Berlin. Christian Democrat leader Friedrich Merz demands the automatic and immediate return at the border of people who have travelled to Germany via safe third countries and do not have a visa. This would be contrary to EU law (Dublin III), but there are experts, such as former President of the Constitutional Court Hans-Jürgen Papier, who believe that this is not true. Refusals under Art. 18 of the German Asylum Act are, in his opinion, not only possible, but even necessary. This paragraph states that entry from safe third countries must be refused. The article stresses that Germany is surrounded by safe third countries without exception. “Exceptions on humanitarian grounds have become the rule at Germany’s external borders. This is contrary to the meaning of asylum law,” said the former president of the Constitutional Court, who considers that national law takes precedence over European law in this case.
Merz and Papier’s opinion is shared by the German Association of Cities and Municipalities. This is a lobby group for German municipalities that are responsible for housing asylum seekers and complain about being overwhelmed. Just like in Bavaria’s Rott am Inn. The pushback of migrants at the borders has been going on for some time. And it has accelerated significantly in the last three months. This spring, significantly more people were turned away at Germany’s land borders than before the additional checks ordered by Minister Faeser in October 2023. This is clear from the federal government’s response to a written question from CDU MP Christoph de Vries. It shows that in April and May of this year, a total of 2,938 people were turned away at the land borders with Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland, which is around 90 percent more than in the same period last year. According to German non-governmental organizations that help migrants, cited by the Tagesspiegel daily, hundreds of migrants have been pushed from Germany to Poland, despite having declared that they wanted to “seek asylum” in the federal republic. Michael Kurzwelly, an artist from Frankfurt (Oder), tried to help two migrants from Yemen who were taken across the border to Poland, to Słubice. When he accompanied them to the federal police on the German side to explain his asylum claim again, the police accused him of being a smuggler and then took him and the migrants back to the Polish side. “This seems to be a regular practice now,” Kurzwelly told the newspaper.
Other activists claim that there are at least 80 illegal migrants camped in Zielona Góra, some of whom have tried to reach Germany four times and have always been returned to Poland. No one wanted to listen to their asylum applications. No one checked whether they entered Poland via Belarus or the so-called new Balkan route, so according to the Dublin rules, Poland would not be responsible for them, but the country through which they arrived first – usually Greece or Italy. According to the German organisation Pro Asyl, the number of migrants returned at the German-Polish border in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern increased by three to 2,386 in the first quarter of 2024 compared to 2023. “Such a drastically increased number requires explanation and confirms our concern that illegal rejections may occur at the German border,” says Dirk Morlok from Pro Asyl. At the same time, the number of people who successfully entered Germany and applied for asylum fell during this period from 2,268 to 450. According to Morlok, this is also due to the fact that the German police are intimidating migrants so that they do not apply for asylum protection. Meanwhile, the German government boasts of a significant decline in asylum applications filed in the first quarter of this year.
Migrants expelled by Germany are becoming a problem for neighbouring countries. As the German daily “Die Welt” writes: If German practice changes in accordance with the wishes of CDU leader Friedrich Merz and Germany consistently rejects migrants from other EU countries, all migrants from Poland – both those who apply for asylum and those who do not apply for asylum – could be rejected. If rejections also occur directly at the border, several thousand illegal migrants could arrive in Poland every month. Another European country bordering Germany and where Berlin wants to expel migrants, Austria, has already said that it will not take them back. And what about Poland? That is not known. Although Prime Minister Donald Tusk has announced consultations on this matter with German partners, there is still no basic information about how many illegal migrants from Germany are currently arriving in Poland, and whether this is happening in consultation with the authorities in Warsaw. There is silence while Berlin is clearly preparing to consolidate a practice that, from its point of view, already brings tangible benefits.
Austrian migration researcher Gerald Knaus warns against the consequences of Germany sending migrants to the borders. “Suspending EU law would be an atomic bomb, it would lead to many EU members following suit,” Knaus told ZDF television. And the consequences of this would be serious internal disputes within the EU and chaos.
