Germany: Report slams Merz's immigration policies

"German refugee policies are not suitable for current global challenges," concluded Benjamin Etzold this week in Berlin, where he presented the "Global Forced Displacement Report" he co-wrote along with his colleagues from the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies (BICC).

Recalling Germany's recent federal election campaign, which was significantly shaped by the issue of immigration, Etzold thinks the debate was too "heated" and too focused on how immigration affects Germany — something he believes is unlikely to change under the new government.

The researcher thinks the public debate could be improved by more interest in facts and scientific findings, while the global dimension of displacement is still largely being ignored.

Do border controls deter?
The migration expert also sharply criticized Chancellor Friedrich Merz's major new policy announcement: The tightening of border controls and turning back of migrants and asylum seekers. The effectiveness of such measures is hugely overestimated, Etzold said.

Franck Düvell, a migration researcher at Osnabrück University, agrees. "Whenever someone is turned back, he will try again and again and again, until he is in the country."

This applies to the European Union's internal and external borders. "Whenever one route is closed, there is another route nearby. It may be more dangerous, but it then becomes more frequently used," Düvell said, explaining the effect he and other researchers have analyzed. This is precisely what brings human traffickers onto the scene.

How smuggling networks make money
Human traffickers specialize in providing irregular, sometimes illegal, and often life-threatening migration routes to desperate people.

"That could be using fake documents, that could be being hidden in trucks, it could be these unseaworthy boats," said Düvell, another of the BICC report's authors. "That is the unwanted side effect, which we repeatedly see with such measures."

Against this backdrop, the asylum and migration experts see the new report as an appeal to the international community to pull together to tackle the problem.

"It is urgently necessary that multilateral refugee and migrant policies are resurrected, even without the participation of the United States," said Etzold. "Germany can and should take a European and global leadership position on this issue, instead of pursuing fragmented national responses."


Improving people's prospects
More and more people seeking protection are being detained in camps for long periods. They may be provided for and managed there, Etzold said, but the desperate lack of prospects in such places forces people to move on, many of them to Germany.

The researcher sees only one viable way to change that "Ultimately, only legal security and improved life prospects where they are can reduce the pressure for further migration and prevent irregular migration to Germany."

Etzold thinks that the announcement by Germany's new government that it wants to drastically limit legal access routes through humanitarian reception programs or family reunification is counterproductive. He believes that policy could even encourage the irregular migration that they want to combat.

Not only that, Petra Bendel of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, who also worked on the report, fears that Germany could be breaking the law by turning people back at the border. The right to asylum is protected in both Germany's constitution, or Basic Law, as well as European law.

"If you put politics ahead of these laws, then you are opening the door to despotism," she said.