Of the total number of illegal migrants earmarked for deportation from the German state of Saxony-Anhalt last year, only a fraction were successfully carried out, the state’s interior minister has revealed.
In response to a parliamentary question from a left-wing lawmaker, the CDU Interior Minister Tamara Zieschang noted how just 535 of the 1,848 planned repatriations of illegal migrants to their country of origin were successfully achieved in 2023 — just under 29 percent of all cases.
The minister explained how in 565 cases, the would-be deportee had absconded and could not be located, while 354 cases involved legal attempts to thwart deportation proceedings or administrative failures in providing the necessary paperwork.
A further 205 illegal migrants were rejected by their country of origin, and in 46 cases the concerned individual evaded deportation through “church asylum” — a practice in Germany whereby prospective refugees can seek temporary protection through their local parish should they be considered to face persecution back in their home country. The measure allows time for a re-examination of their protection status by the state.
A further 37 cases were disrupted by illness and individuals not being medically fit to be deported, 17 cases were thwarted by urgent applications to German courts, and 9 cases were adjourned due to ongoing criminal proceedings.
The governing center-right CDU in the German state accused the federal government comprising a left-liberal coalition of being responsible for the low success rate, denouncing recent bilateral agreements with third countries as “nothing more than a bad PR stunt.”
“They have not brought about any noticeable improvements,” said Chris Schulenburg, the CDU’s domestic policy spokesman in Saxony.
At the national level, leading CDU politicians have expressed their support for off-shore processing of asylum applications as a way to reduce the attractiveness of Germany as a migrant hotspot. The move would mirror similar policies adopted by the U.K. Conservative government and fellow EU member states Denmark and Italy.
In December last year, the CDU’s former health minister, Jens Spahn, said, “If we did this and kept it up consequently for four, six, eight weeks, we would see the numbers reduce dramatically.”
CDU leader Friedrich Merz and Thorsten Frei, the deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, have also commented in favor of radically reforming Germany’s asylum policy.
Data from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) published earlier this year revealed how asylum applications jumped by 51.1 percent to 350,000 last year compared to 2022 when 217,774 applications were made.
Prof. Hans-Jürgen Papier, who served as president of the Federal Constitutional Court for eight years until 2010, claimed that the German asylum law was not fit for purpose and claimed the country was being abused by an influx of economic migrants with the luxury of handpicking which European nation they’d like to settle in.
“Many people come to our country from all parts of the world for clearly non-asylum reasons. The right to asylum is therefore being misused and, in many cases, applied for improperly in Germany,” he noted.
Meanwhile, figures published this week by the Federal Employment Agency revealed how welfare benefits were sky-rocketing across Germany, with more than two-thirds of beneficiaries being either first or second-generation migrants.
