Germany is inching closer to a major overhaul of citizenship and immigration laws that could see 2 million immigrants become citizens overnight, with Interior Minister Nancy Faeser and Chancellor Olaf Scholz, both of the Social Democrats (SPD), driving forward with their plan even as the country deals with a crisis that has seen 1.2 million migrants arrive just in 2022.
The new law features a number of major changes, listed below, that will shape Germany’s demographic and political future for generations. They are nothing short of radical, with Junge Freiheit columnist Michael Paulwitz summing up their impact:
The citizenship certificate, a document that should be among the most desirable and hardest to obtain in the world, becomes an effortless junk item in Germany’s ‘going out of business’ sale… The Federal Minister of the Interior is planning nothing more and nothing less than a coup from above against the sovereign of the German Basic Law, the state’s people. The composition (of Germany’s population) will be radically transformed and in fact replaced by a randomly mixed-up population. Of course, nobody asked the people about this, just like with all other previous substantive changes.
Less time to become a citizen
Currently, foreigners must live in Germany for eight years to obtain citizenship in most cases, but the new law would reduce this to five to become naturalized. In exceptional cases, the new law would allow migrants to receive citizenship in just three years for those who show sufficient language skills and professional or academic achievement.
The immediate result of this change would be approximately 2 million migrants — many of them Syrians along with other Middle Easterners and Africans who arrived in 2015 and 2016 — to obtain citizenship overnight along with their children.
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Automatic citizenship for children
The Federal Ministry of the Interior also plans for all children of migrants to automatically receive German citizenship if one parent has had their “lawful habitual residence” in Germany for five years.
Dual citizenship
The reform would also mean an end to the obligation requiring German citizens to renounce their other citizenship. As a result, Germany will begin a new regime of dual citizenship.
Easier language requirement for seniors
For migrants aged 67 years and older, language requirements will be “simplified,” and they will no longer have to take a written test to prove sufficient language ability; instead, they will only have to prove their “ability to communicate orally.”
Even more shocking is that for those who are illiterate, there will be a “hardship regulation,” which means no tests at all will be required in order to obtain German citizenship.
No more German cultural requirements
In addition, a “classification” of the migrants’ assimilation “into German living customs” is no longer required, Bild newspaper reports. In other words, Germany is abandoning the idea that migrants have to integrate into German society. For example, authorities previously checked whether applicants for a German passport were possibly married to several wives at the same time.
These cultural factors matter.
Germany has seen a rapid increase in child brides, and as many as 68,000 women are threatened with female genital mutilation, which the German government asserts is entirely due to the country’s massively growing immigrant population from Africa and the Middle East.
How far is the bill away from being passed?
An internal report from the SPD parliamentary group states that the new law will reach the cabinet by Christmas
A massive coup for the left
The idea of the Great Replacement has long been rejected by liberal fact-checkers, who have labeled it a “conspiracy theory.” Nevertheless, both immigration and birth rate data showing the rapid growth of non-European populations and the falling share of European natives has shown demonstrable proof that Europe is being demographically transformed.
Furthermore, many who argue that the Great Replacement is occurring also point out that the left is looking to raise the migrant share of the population to increase votes for their own pro-migration parties, a trend also seen in the United States. In Germany, the new law will immediately introduce what could amount to nearly 2 million new German voters and many more over the years who will overwhelmingly support parties such as SPD and Greens.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has hinted about their new role as voters while defending the new naturalization regime, saying, “Anyone who lives and works here on a permanent basis should also be able to vote and be elected; they should be part of our country with all the rights and duties that go with it. And this should be completely independent of origin, skin color, or religious affiliation.
“Nine million citizens live and work in our country without having German citizenship. But a democracy thrives on the opportunity to have a say. This is how legitimacy is created, this is how the acceptance of government decisions grows.”
With SPD dropping in the polls and the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany rising, SPD will need this new crop of voters to maintain power.
Crime reporting will be ‘fixed’
One of the major talking points against mass migration, often deployed by the Alternative for Germany (AFD) party, will quickly be “fixed” with the new changes to the German citizenship law.
In general, Germany keeps no crime statistics on the race or ethnicity of perpetrators. Instead, it tracks the share of citizens versus foreigners in the data, which at the very least, allows the state to track the share of crimes committed by Germany’s new migrant population, which has ballooned in recent years.
As Remix News has reported, the data has not been pretty, with foreigners accounting for a massive share of serious crimes such as rape, murder, sexual assault, and robbery. For example, in the case of murder, foreigners are responsible for 39 percent of all cases despite making up approximately 11 percent of the population.
This 39 percent data point is also already misleading, as the other 61 percent of murders committed by “Germans” could include, for example, second-generation Turks or Kurds with German citizenship. Again, the current data makes no distinction between ethnic Germans and people with Turkish roots who obtained German citizenship.
All the troubling crime statistics regarding foreigners “disappears” once these foreigners are naturalized as citizens, and the jump in murders will suddenly be lumped into the “German” category, with the public left in the dark about how many crimes are being committed by these freshly minted citizens.
Conservatives strongly against plan
The Alternative for Germany (AFD) and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) are firmly opposing the plan, but even more troubling for the SPD and the Greens is the opposition of some politicians of the Free Democrats (FDP), which is the smallest party in the coalition government.
“Now is not the time to simplify the citizenship law. There will be no devaluation of German citizenship with the FDP,” said FDP General Secretary Bijan Djir-Sarai to the Rheinische Post.
Djir-Sarai criticized the fact that Germany, which struggles to deport even convicted criminals, has “so far made no progress on repatriation” and “fighting illegal migration.” The politician also warned against granting German citizenship too lightly.
The FDP may be playing a double game in its opposition to the naturalization plans. After all, the party has long promoted mass immigration, and has lobbied for 500,000 migrants a year. However, the FDP has seen a massive drop in support. Given that a majority of Germans have expressed “big worries” about the amount of migrants coming to the country, the party may be seeking to gain a temporary boost in popularity by offering some token resistance to the plan.
The spokesman for AfD’s parliamentary group, Gottfried Curio, also warned of the “creeping incapacitation of German citizens” and said the country is being pulled away from under their feet. He said Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) planted the seed, referring to her decision to admit over 1 million migrants during the 2015 and 2016 migrant crisis, and now it is “harvest time.”
CDU Parliamentary Secretary Thorsten Frei warned that “The German passport must not become a junk commodity.”
We already have a very attractive and liberal naturalization law, Frei argued, adding that “for CDU and CSU, the following applies: German citizenship must be at the end of the integration process, not at the beginning. Anything else jeopardizes the cohesion of our society and this country.”
Deputy parliamentary group leader Andrea Lindholz of CSU said, “The traffic light (coalition) obviously wants to sell off the German passport. Soon, practically everyone is to get it. Foreigners in Germany will thus be deprived of a great incentive to integrate. That could become a real threat to cohesion in our society.”
