The German centrist government is doing dumb and illegal stuff on immigration
The German government has been performing more border controls than usual this year.
It’s basically a way for the center-right and center-left parties to show they are being “tough on immigration.”
The center-right and center-left European parties are having a hard time breaking away from the idea that if they just bitch and moan about immigrants like the rightwing parties do, that will attract voters away from the far-right parties like Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD). Despite the experience of countries including Britain, France, and Italy over the last decade and a half showing such policies just reinforce the far-right xenophobic framing and help the far-right parties, they can’t seem to give up the addiction to dumb messaging.
The current policies of the Trump 2.0 regime in the US have shown how xenophobia and dishonest hysteria over immigrants can be used as a key rallying point to undermine democracy and the rule of law and to implement a distinctly authoritarian system. The Trumpist budget bill just passed by Congress vastly expands the increasingly lawless ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). As Judith Levine describes:
The press had been focused on the wealth gap the budget turns into the San Andreas fault. It had been dutifully mentioning increases in funding for the military – to an unprecedented $1.3tn – and “border security”.
Set aside for a moment that phrase’s implication, that the US is being invaded – which it isn’t – and it is still not apt. The jurisdiction of the federal police force that this budget will finance promises to stretch far beyond immigration; its ambitions will outstrip even the deportation of every one of the nearly 48 million immigrants in the country, including the three-quarters of them who are citizens, green-card holders or have temporary visas.
The colossal buildup of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) will create the largest domestic police force in the US; its resources will be greater than those of every federal surveillance and carceral agency combined; it will employ more agents than the FBI. Ice will be bigger than the military of many countries. When it runs out of brown and Black people to deport, Ice – perhaps under another name – will be left with the authority and capability to surveil, seize and disappear anyone the administration considers undesirable. It is hard to imagine any president dismantling it.1 [my emphasis]
On that last point, the Democrats really should commit to abolishing ICE in its current form. Redo the whole thing. Require that ICE agents making arrest adhere to at least the minimal standards of legal conduct required of regular police officers. (The latter need to be expected to observe such standards better than they often do, as well.) The Republicans are always going to accuse the Democrats of being “soft on crime,” so why not do the right thing on ICE and push back on Republicans defenses of ICE misconduct with well-publicized Congressional hearings and persistent messaging about how we can’t have masked thugs carrying combat-grade rifles who don’t even identify themselves kidnapping people off the street.
Border controls in the “Schengen Area” of Europe
The German border-control stunt is 99% a public relations stunt. It mostly slows cross-border traffic, the ease of which under the normal EU regulations has been and remains one of the most popular features of the EU. And for business, a very practical one. Border controls slow down cross-border shipments. And free movement of people and goods within the EU is a basic legal principle of the whole arrangement.
The German Tagesschau reports that even police unions are complaining about what a waste of time and resources this whole stunt is:
A lot of effort for a few rejections at the borders: The police union criticizes the tightened controls, which lead to millions of hours of overtime. The Polish government is also disgruntled.
The police union has once again criticized the heightened controls at the German borders. The effort is disproportionate, they say, and there is a risk of long traffic jams during the holiday season. The chairman of the federal police district of the police union (GdP), Andreas Roßkopf, told the Augsburger Allgemeine: "The number of rejections of asylum and protection seekers is actually very low, but the effort for the federal police is huge."
The official figure of 285 rejections at the borders by the end of June is now offset by 2.8 million overtime hours in the Federal Police. "This puts an enormous strain on the motivation and health of the employees," Roßkopf warned. The trade unionist called for the intensity of border controls to be reduced as quickly as possible.2
The particulars here involve something that pretty much everyone at all familiar with the EU immigration system and laws knows is a chronic problem. It known as the “Schengen system,” from the 1985 Schengen Agreement. The “Schengen Area” is larger than the EU. Non-EU member Switzerland, for instance, is part of the Schengen zone. It means that the country of first arrival for people not citizens of a Schengen country checks their passports. Once admitted to the Schengen zone, people are allowed to travel freely to other Schengen countries without having a separate visa for the individual Schengen country they are entering.
The Schengen Agreement predates the formal founding of the European Union in 1993. For people with visas and commercial traffic, this makes the process of visiting the Schengen Area much easier and much more efficient than having only national border controls. It also makes the process cheaper and more easily manageable for individuals countries’ governments.
But the Schengen rules apply also to asylum-seekers, who are often refugees without visas. Since the country of first entry is responsible to process asylums claims, that means countries like Germany or Austria or the Netherlands can dump the responsibility for those requesting asylum onto the Schengen border countries like Poland, Greece, and Hungary.
Without going into the details, the so-called “refugee crisis” of 2015-2016 showed this was unworkable when it came to large influxes of refugees. One of the bizarre ironies of the current situation is that the EU – to the surprise of many – handled the influx of Ukrainian refugees after the Russian invasion of 2022 in a very different way, even though at its peak it was something like three times as many refugees as in the 2015-16 “crisis.”3
For one thing, they didn’t treat them technically as refugees. Even before the 2022 war began, Ukrainians were allowed to travel visa-free in the EU for three months. The stays have been extended repeatedly with the Ukrainians enjoying the status of protected persons. So the EU has shown itself able to deal with a refugee problem much bigger than that of 2015-16 without losing their minds over it.
But for non-Ukrainian refugees, the Schengen system means that that the countries on the outer border of the Schengen area is responsible for processing refugees’ asylum requests. And that also mean housing them, maintaining them, and integrating them into the host country while the asylum applications are processed. At the same time, international law requires that when a person enters another country and requests asylum, the receiving country is required to give them due process of law in processing the asylum claim and to support them during the process. And not just international law, the same rightsd for the politically persecuted are founded directly in the German Constitution (called the “Basic Law”).
The obvious practical solution would be some kind of official sharing of the settlement of refugees. Angela Merkel’s government in Germany adopted that practice on an emergency basis in 2015. That was a practical immediate solution but also a problematic one in that it was basically a one-time national decision to solve an EU dilemma.
That’s the background of the Kabuki theater with the German border controls with Poland. It lets the German government say, “Look! We’re preventing asylum-seekers who should have registered in Poland from coming into Germany.” It’s a problem with the international law on asylum. And it’s also a problem for the EU. Because it’s certainly reasonable for a country like Poland to expect practical solidarity from its EU partners. (In the 2025 geopolitical context, it’s a critical consideration that Poland has the largest army of any EU country.)
As Tageschau reports:<
Germany has already been carrying out random checks at the border with Poland since October 2023. Shortly after the new [German] federal government [under conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz] took office, [German] Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt ordered further strengthened controls on May 8. Asylum seekers should be turned away. This led to criticism from the governments of Germany's neighboring states. In response, Poland introduced border controls on Monday.
When someone comes to the border and requests asylum, international law requires the country of whom the request is made to accept them as a candidate for asylum. Refusing them entry or sending them back across the border is known as a “pushback” and is illegal. The current international laws on asylum were heavily influenced by the experience of the Second World War and its aftermath.
Shame on Merz’ government for indulging in this kind of illegal action. And how dumb is it be for Germany to needlessly piss off its Polish neighbors when the EU nations and Britain are scrambling to build a European defense capability independence of the US?
Levine, Judith (2025): Ice is about to become the biggest police force in the US. Guardian 07/09/2025. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/09/ice-immigration-police-trump-budget-bill> (Accessed: 2025-10-07).
Kritik an Grenzkontrollen reißt nicht ab. Tagesschau 08.07.2025. <https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/polen-grenzkontrollen-124.html> (Accessed: 2025-10-07). My translation to English.
I’m trying to be conservative on the numbers here. It could well have been as much as five times higher at its peak. The number of refugees during the so-called border crisis of 2015-16 commonly cited is 1.1 million. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) provides extensive statistics on Ukrainian refugees. <https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine> But they can be challenging for non-demographers (like me) to interpret, not least because they have to be viewed in the context of border crossings to and from Ukraine to a particular country.
As of this writing, UNHCR estimates 5.1 million Ukrainian refugees in Europe, which includes Russia. The website notes that the number in Russia could last be estimated in June 2023, at which time it stood at 1.2 million. The UNHCR Ukraine Situation Flash Update #42 of 03/07/2023 <https://webarchive.archive.unhcr.org/20250602164356/https://reporting.unhcr.org/ukraine-situation-flash-update-42> estimated at that time there were 8.1 million Ukrainian refugees in Europe including Russia.