Germany faces with great concern the increase in irregular migration on its borders, especially in those of Poland and the Czech Republic, a trend that began to be noticed last year and that has only increased so far this year. In the first half of 2023, the federal police intercepted 45,338 foreigners who had entered illegally through land, sea and airport borders, which is 56% more than in the same period last year (29,174). Most of the new arrivals are originally from Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey, Georgia and Russia.
The situation is tense national politics, with repeated reproaches from the conservative opposition to the coalition government of social democrats, environmentalists and liberals of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, within which unrest also reigns. The Christian Democrat leader, Friedrich Merz, has called for random police checks on the Polish and Czech borders, as already exist on the border with Austria. The Minister of the Interior, the social democrat Nancy Faeser, introduced them in November 2022 with prior notice to Brussels, and they will last until this November.
The increased migratory pressure also exacerbates tensions between Germany and Italy. This week, Berlin suspended “until further notice” the voluntary reception mechanism for asylum seekers – created last year by the EU – from Italy. According to the Dublin protocol, asylum applications must be processed by the first European country where the potential refugee was registered. Germany committed to hosting 3,500 applicants from countries on the southern border, those most affected by migration. But Italy, overwhelmed by arrivals by sea, is not assuming the returns from Germany also provided for by Dublin regulations, and hence Berlin’s reaction.
The Italian Prime Minister, the far-right Giorgia Meloni, played down the disagreement, and called for concentrating efforts on preventing arrivals in her country. The Italian island of Lampedusa is saturated these days receiving more than 8,500 sub-Saharans who have risked their lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea. The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, will visit the island this Sunday with Giorgia Meloni.
There is therefore a general European context of an increase in irregular arrivals, as Frontex, the agency that monitors the EU’s external borders, pointed out on Friday. In the first eight months of 2023, there were 232,350 illegal crossings, the highest figure for the January-August period since 2016. And the increase is mainly due to the greater number of arrivals through the central Mediterranean, which despite its dangerousness – we will never know how many people have drowned in the desperate attempt – it continues to be the main migratory route to the EU.
In Germany, the problem is concentrated in the east. On the German-Polish border, 12,331 illegal entries were registered in the first half of this year, compared to the 4,592 detected in the first six months of 2022. Authorities and media point out that the bulk of these people – mostly from Middle East – continues to arrive through the Belarusian route, that is, the path opened in 2021 by the president of Belarus, Aleksánder Lukashenko, to use migration as a geopolitical weapon of pressure against the European Union (EU). Lukashenko attracted them to his country with the promise of easy transit to community territory.
Soon, Poland built a controversial fence on its border with Belarus, which despite everything, some migrants still manage to cross today to go to Germany. It is a forested and swampy strip – the Bialowieza border forest -, repeatedly denounced by Polish human rights NGOs working on the ground, because those who cross, sometimes sick or injured due to the mistreatment received by the Belarusian border guard, are left at risk. from the cold and humidity, disoriented and afraid of being intercepted by the Polish police and not being able to continue their journey to Germany.
“The situation on the border has been worsening for months,” said yesterday the head of the Interior of the Land of Brandenburg – bordering Poland –, the Christian Democrat Michael Stübgen, to the newspaper Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung. Stübgen demands random police controls like those in Bavaria with Austria and accuses Minister Faeser of discarding the same system in Brandenburg and Saxony – the other eastern land affected – “without good reason”, thus giving room for maneuver to the “gangs”. of unscrupulous smugglers” who traffic people at the borders.
So far in September, the federal police have sent an average of 58 migrants a day to the Brandenburg first reception center in Eisenhüttenstadt. The conservative opposition insists that the mayors are overwhelmed. “We run the risk of suffering a collapse of integration due to overload,” warns Stübgen, a warning already launched by Merz at the beginning of summer at a meeting with foreign correspondents in Berlin. Although border surveillance is the task of the federal police, Brandenburg and Saxony have reinforced the deployment of their respective regional police to, within their powers, try to hinder the business of traffickers.
However, for Germany, the current situation is not even remotely similar to that experienced in the summer of 2015, when the wave of asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan traveling along the Balkan route prompted the then chancellor, Christian Democrat Angela Merkel, to open the country’s borders to them. (Before that, there had been 217,237 illegal entries that year.)
More than a million refugees arrived then, especially Syrians, the majority of whom continue to reside in this country. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a new contingent of refugees emerged. Germany currently hosts 1.1 million Ukrainian war refugees, most of them women and children.
