Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s interior minister said that he wants to ’send a clear signal to the world and to Europe that the policy in Germany has changed.’
The new German government has ordered authorities to turn back more illegal immigrants at the nation’s borders.
On
May 7, the first day of the new administration, German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt issued the order, which he said would gradually increase the number of rejections while implementing stronger controls at Germany’s borders.
“This issue is about clarity, consistency and control. We are not going to close the borders, but we are going to control the borders more strictly and this stronger control of the borders will also lead to a higher number of rejections,” Dobrindt
said.
“We will ensure that, step by step, more police forces are deployed at the borders and can also carry out these push-backs.”
He noted that vulnerable people, including children and pregnant women, would not be rejected at the German border.
“It’s not a question of starting to reject everyone in full tomorrow, but of ensuring, bit by bit, that the excessive demands are reduced, that we reduce the numbers and that we send a clear signal to the world and to Europe that the policy in Germany has changed,” Dobrindt said in comments published in
Politico.
The order rescinds the de facto 2015 practice under former Chancellor Angela Merkel that allowed 1 million illegal immigrants to enter Germany at the border if they claimed asylum.
At the time, Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees announced, in one single social-media
post, that it was suspending the Dublin Protocol, a rule requiring refugees to apply for asylum in the first EU member state where they set foot.
As a result, Germany became the
first-choice destination for a vast influx of refugees from war-torn Syria. But news of the suspension quickly spread among asylum-seekers worldwide, many of whom discarded their
passports to enter the country.
In January, Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose new government formally
assumed office on May 6, vowed to impose permanent border controls after a deadly knife attack in Bavaria and the arrest of an Afghan illegal immigrant.
His administration, in coalition with the center-left SPD, has the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) hot on its heels, which touts a harder line on immigration and has been consistently polling as the country’s second-most popular party.
Merz
has vowed never to govern with the right-wing party AfD, despite its second-place finish in the general election, even though doing so would ensure a clear majority.
On May 2, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency officially classified AfD as “
extremist.”
A survey by Ipsos in
March shows that the AfD party topped the polls for the first time.
AfD later announced that it was suing the country’s domestic intelligence service for classifying it as a “right-wing extremist organization.”
Dobrindt’s policy is in line with Europe, which is
hardening its stance on immigration as well.
Under the European Union’s Pact on Migration and Asylum, member states can strike agreements with non-EU states to handle asylum claims extraterritorially, potentially setting up processing centers in North Africa or beyond.
Illegal immigrants are entering the EU primarily via Mediterranean sea crossings from North Africa and by overland routes through Poland and the Balkans, according to data from Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency.
Under pressure from parties with more hardline immigration platforms, establishment political parties have steadily abandoned their once-progressive immigration stances and supported the reintroduction of
internal border controls in the free-movement Schengen Area.
In 2024, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen
proposed striking deals with non-EU countries from which illegal immigrants originate or through which they transit in order to stop migrants in those countries.
She also suggested sending those with no right to stay in the EU to “return hubs” in non-EU countries, such as Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania, Senegal, and Mali.
No such hubs have been established yet.
