German mainstream parties imitating the far right on refugee issues

A large part of the German political class seems to have come down with the chronic affliction of the US Democratic Party, trying fecklessly to imitate Republican positions instead of fighting for their own side. On the refugee and other immigration issues, the current nonsense the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Christian Democratic Union are promoting will strengthen the xenophobic appeal of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). The Left Party (Die Linke) have limited clout nationally, but they have also been known to indulge xenophobic sentiments, now with a split-off electoral list headed by Sarah Wagenknecht. It’s a disturbing picture overall.

They all need to snap out of it.

Christian Jakob puts it very well:

Obviously, the EU does not want to be blackmailed [by other countries like Turkey or Russia or Belarus] with refugees. But the fact that this is possible at all is their own fault. For years, the whole world has been able to see how panicked people in Europe react to arrivals [of refugees] and what destabilizing effects of their inability to constructively shape the reality of migration – as was the case with Ukrainians in 2022.¹ [my emphasis]

That last point isn’t formulated as clearly as it might have been. He is referring to how responsibly and constructively on the EU reacted to Ukrainian refugees.

So much so that one might have imagined EU leaders learned some very constructive lessons from the refugee “crisis” of 2015-16, 1wne .1 million refugees came into the EU within the space of a year. In 2022-23, five times that many came into the EU from Ukraine. That much larger number was handled with any major public freakouts. Nor were the EU’s capacities overburdened, or public services broken down because of it.

Immigration is a complicated issue in many ways. So can issues of “integration” of refugees into the host countries be.

But the worst complications by far come from xenophobic hysteria promoted by the radical right parties and various and sundry scumbags, especially if the alleged respectable parties who support democracy and the rule of law start playing the same irresponsible game.

To be a big more accurate, everyone can see how irresponsibly many EU politicians react to immigration and how pathetically willing the political systems have sometimes been in letting xenophobic agitators gain more credibility than they even remotely deserve.

As always, national issues are not identical to EU issues. But immigration and refugees are fundamentally EU problems. And what German leaders are currently promoting more equitable burden-sharing within the EU on refugee issues - a legitimate issue in itself and one on which Germany has real reason to complain - the rhetoric the leading German politicians are now promoting aims and restrictions on EU refugee reception as a whole. And often the measures being proposed are impractical, or in violation of international law, or both.

Jakob continues:

It was the EU itself that, under the impression of the arrivals from Belarus [in 2021], declared refugees to be a "hybrid threat", a kind of soft weapon of war. When you do this, you're inviting your opponents to use them accordingly. Depriving people of their rights – as envisaged by [a proposed] new [EU] regulation – does not change that.

The EU remains susceptible to blackmail as long as it constantly declares refugees to be the "greatest danger". The same holds for the democratic parties in Germany. The more they agree with the AfD that not enough is being done to block, the more they are increase their own vulnerability to the AfD. [my emphasis]

“Hybrid threat” is also called “hybrid warfare,” which in relation to refugees plays even more into the xenophobic, narrow-nationalistic frame. In that concept, the victims of the war who become refugees are redefined as a military threat themselves. Xenophobes commonly used the term “invasion” to describe immigration generally. This kind of thinking rots people’s minds. And souls, too.

Germany’s politicians might want to take a few minutes to look at the current edition of the bimonthly SPIEGEL Geschichte, which features the history of the 14 million German refugees who were displaced after the Second World War, many of them driven out in forced relocations from the countries where they lived.²

The experience didn’t stop a significant number of those affected from supporting far-right revanchist groups in German politics. Sympathy for others affected by war and mass expulsion isn’t the reaction of all who had the experience themselves.

But the mainstream German party leaders need a strong dose of practical, realistic thinking on the “migration” issue, as the xenophobes prefer to call it. When it happened to 14 million Germans after the war, they were regarded as “displaced persons” (Vertriebene) - which was also the formal legal definition given to Ukrainian war refugees currently. But using “migrants” make them sound more like people who just decided to wander into another country on a whim.

But that shouldn’t detract from what everyone focusing on, reporting on, writing about, or just having conversations needs to keep in mind: the EU proved in 2022-23 with Ukrainian refugees that the can effectively and humanely handled a far larger influx of refugees than they experienced during the “crisis” of 2015-16.

1. Jakob, Christian (2023): Hauptsache gegen Migration. Blätter 12:2023, 13-16. My translation from German.

2. Verlorene Heimat.Flucht und Vertreibung: Hitlers Krieg und die Folgen, SPIEGEL Geschichte 6.2023.