From next Monday, Germany is set to reject the European Union’s open borders and secure its frontiers against illegal migrants to protect its citizens. If Germany can do it, why can’t we push back illegal migrants? In defiance of the EU’s borderless Schengen Area set up in 1990, Germany will expand border checks to all of its nine national borders.
The country has suffered a spate of knife attacks on its citizens by suspected asylum-seekers and immigrants. And German interior minister Nancy Faeser said the action would ”protect us from the acute dangers posed by Islamist terrorism and serious crime”, caused by what is now termed euphemistically “irregular immigration”.
The seismic impact of the country’s U-turn on the European project is hard to overestimate.
After all, Germany was the leading EU state to welcome with open arms hundreds of thousands of migrants in 2015 under Angela Merkel’s chancellorship. Many claimed to be refugees of the war in Syria but many more were in fact economic migrants. In total, some 2.85 million people claimed asylum in Germany, the vast majority Muslim.
The impact on Germany has been profound.
Initially, the left-leaning German media downplayed crime caused by incomers – assaults on women, and acts of terrorism included – but the regularity of such incidents has finally broken through. Most recently, at a festival in Solingen, north-east Germany, last month when three citizens had their throats fatally cut and four more were seriously injured in a mass knife attack by a Syrian refugee.
As usual, the German authorities were slow to broadcast a motive, but Islamic State claimed responsibility. Yet the story was only too familiar. Arriving in 2022, the 26-year-old suspect’s asylum claim was rejected and he was supposed to be deported to Bulgaria, but the authorities failed to find him in time leaving him free to kill.
The political fall-out has been almost instantaneous with the right-wing, anti-migrant party Alternative for Germany (AfD) gaining many more votes in recent regional elections, coming top in Thuringia, beating all other parties. Now even centrist German politicians are talking tough with some suggesting they deploy the Rwanda scheme dismissed by Sir Keir Starmer, using buildings and infrastructure paid for by British taxpayers.
But words are cheap and impatient voters want to see action. Across the EU, many other governments are finally accepting this is a problem they cannot ignore. In alliance with a right-wing party, Sweden’s government has hit negative net migration with its numbers of asylum seekers heading towards an historic low. Their restrictive asylum policies, including plans for a so-called “snitch law” that legally requires public sector workers to report undocumented people, have made migrants seek easier targets abroad such as the UK.
Even France’s new prime minister, Michel Barnier, notorious for his Brexit intransigence, campaigned on the promise of a three to five year moratorium on all immigration, tightening the criteria for family reunification and reducing the numbers of long-stay visas. His strict stance has the support of right-wing Marine Le Pen who wants him to deliver on his promises. Italy, now led by the robust anti-migrant Georgia Meloni, has agreed a deal with Albania in which their asylum seekers are processed abroad.
And yet, just as the rest of Europe is waking up to the growing danger of undocumented migration, Sir Keir Starmer has gone soft on boats crossing the Channel by rejecting the deterrent of processing them in Rwanda in favour of “cracking down” on the people-smuggling gangs. It sounds like a solution but in reality no one is rushing to take on the thankless task of heading the new-look Border Force and, as the Express has reported, if one smuggling king-pin is taken down there are many more to replace them. Desperate migrants will continue to pay for places in small boats.
With millions of pounds in profits helping people cross the Channel, Starmer will not be able to halt the trade in illegal migration unless he makes it pointless by deporting illegal migrants promptly to a third country or pushing them back to France.
As the rest of Europe is finally learning, only real action will satisfy voters and Starmer needs to act sooner rather than later if he is to avoid a surge in support for a right-wing, anti-migrant party. As he cosies up to Europe, this political truth is being made clear to him and he would be foolish to ignore it.
