The head of German newspaper Die Welt’s foreign affairs department, Klaus Geiger, wrote a strongly worded opinion piece arguing that “Germany should stop lying about the link between migration and security.”
According to Geiger, “the terrorist attack in Belgium and many similar incidents in Europe would not have been possible without the EU’s dysfunctional asylum policy,” while asylum seekers are also over-represented among the perpetrators of serious public crime.
Geiger cites the blatant example of such political mendacity when, after the 2016 Würzburg train stabbing, Angela Merkel’s chancellery minister, Peter Altmaier, went around the media with his statement that the terror risk for refugees was “no greater and no less than for the rest of the population.”
Meanwhile, “this statement was by then known to be false.” The same lie was told by the German government after the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, when “the federal government and the Federal Criminal Police Office claimed in unison that there was no connection between this and the flood of refugees,” while “at least six of the eleven perpetrators came via the Balkan route and specifically exploited the chaos caused by the suction effect of open borders to Central Europe.”
Geiger wrote that “it is now an irrefutable fact that most of the attacks in Germany and Europe have been facilitated by a dysfunctional EU immigration policy.”
“First, because it failed to screen out false entry documents; second, because it allowed perpetrators to apply for visas in several Member States, contrary to the Dublin system; and third, because many of the perpetrators were persons subject to exit requirements, only about half of whom had a banned status and could not be deported,” he added.
“We must not deny this clearly established link between migration and Islamist terror and serious crime,” Geiger warned, adding that “these acts cannot be shrugged off as collateral damage of a supposedly humanitarian migration policy,” because such a lack of honesty will make a humane migration policy impossible.
He also wrote that “people need to feel that their state is doing its utmost to ensure the highest possible level of security. If, instead, they see people dying because the EU and nation states are clearly failing on immigration and integration and then hiding it, they will elect parties that clearly name and shame this connection.”
Geiger concluded that “the root of the problem is the EU asylum system. It needs to be reformed in depth. Not in the way the EU is planning with its compromise on asylum, which it sees as a breakthrough despite its best efforts.”
“The only way to find a solution is to allow only those people who have the right to come and stay here. And it is again up to the states to decide who those people are,” he added.
