Through the leafy forest (the evening news before it) the theme of the Dublin procedure now emerges as a crucial argument in the election campaign-driven migration debate and that Germany often fails in it. However, not a single one of the news reports is honest in this context.
Let’s take a look at what the evening news writes about it:
“One of the regulations states that in many cases the state where the refugee first set foot in the EU is responsible for handling the asylum procedure. If the refugees travel on to other EU states and only submit their asylum application there – which is the case in most asylum seekers in Germany – the country of first entry must take the people back under certain conditions.”
In fact, out of the total 351,915 people who filed an initial asylum application in Germany in 2023, the overwhelming majority entered the country illegally. Let’s cite the migration report of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) for 2023:
“Both unauthorized entry and unauthorized stay are punishable and are generally punished with a fine or imprisonment (§ 95 Residence Act).”
This paragraph refers back to § 14 of the Residence Act. In it, it states:
“(1) The entry of a foreign national into the federal territory is unauthorized if he
1. does not possess a required passport or substitute passport in accordance with § 3, paragraph 1,
2. does not possess the required residence permit in accordance with § 4,
2a. possesses a required visa for entry at the time of entry, but obtained it through intimidation, bribery, or collusion, or obtained it through false or incomplete statements and, as a result, has been revoked or annulled with retroactive effect, or
3. is not allowed to enter in accordance with § 11, paragraph 1, 6, or 7, unless he possesses a permit to enter the territory in accordance with § 11, paragraph 8.”
The cases under 3 are people who are required to leave the country.
It’s funny, or rather, that there is actually a law in Germany that defines an unauthorized entry and punishes it with a fine or imprisonment? It doesn’t even seem that way.
By the way, in 2023, as border control was at least re-examined, at least when the people had already arrived in Germany, 127,549 people were found to have entered the country illegally. Return rejections at the border only occurred in 4,776 cases. What this means is that the control had no other effect than a “now he’s here”. And to make the dimensions visible: in 2015, when more than a million people came to Germany without a legal entry, the number of detected unauthorized entries was 217,237; less than a quarter of that.
It’s interesting to look at the history of the Dublin regulations. Originally, there was the Dublin Treaty of 1997, which is a treaty under international law. In it, Article 6 clearly states:
“If the asylum seeker from a third country has illegally crossed the border of a member state by land, sea, or air, the member state through which he has entered is responsible for the examination of the application.”
One can thus clearly say that anyone who wants to get asylum in Germany, but enters the country illegally, is in the jurisdiction of the country from which they entered, except for those who come in through Switzerland.
The evening news reports the opposite:
“In 2023, Germany had a total of 74,622 requests for the transfer of a person to an EU country, of which 55,728 EU countries agreed. In fact, only 5,053 people were actually transferred, not even one-tenth.”
An interesting point, or rather? Because in reality, the other 277,293 people could also be potential cases for a “transfer to an EU country”; they are only not because the border is not rejected.
Now the ratio of the 74,622 requested transfers to the 5,053 actually carried out is quite clear. But the real number ratio, to check the “efficacy” of the current Dublin procedure, is 5,053 to 351,915, because they are all only on the basis of a “tolerated illegality” in the country. In reality, the return can hardly be attempted because the affected people (from their perspective, understandably) refuse to provide information about their entry route and only a small part can be proved to have entered the country illegally. The geographical location of Germany, however, makes it almost impossible not to enter the country from a country that is secure according to the Dublin regulations. Naturally, it’s not quite fitting to use the numbers from 2023 together, because the return procedures are not necessarily carried out in the year of entry, but to make the circumstances visible, it suffices.
There were a total of 277,293 cases in 2023 where it was not even attempted to see if a return was possible, although the physical location of Germany is an inescapable fact. In the ratio to the total number of new arrivals, it was only 1.4 percent who were actually returned to the country where they should have submitted their application in the first place.
It’s interesting that the original treaty was signed because there was a massive wave of immigration in the 1990s and for a while it actually led to a significant decrease. It was Angela Merkel who turned this development around. As a matter of fact, the whole wave of immigration in 2015 was triggered by a halving of the funds provided by the EU for the care of Syrian refugees in Turkey. One can wonder who was behind this and what their intentions were, but it’s not from heaven; the overload of the Balkan countries at the time was real, but also, the reasons for the whole structure are not humanitarian, rather the opposite. This can be seen by looking at the history of the Ukrainian refugees.
The historically usual situation would have been that they would be stuck in the neighboring countries of Ukraine. So the majority of those who fled to the west would be in Poland. At least twice as many as the number of Ukrainians currently in Poland.
This would have had several effects: On the one hand, the Polish politics would look quite different. The unconditional support of Kiev, which Warsaw has been exercising in recent years, was only possible because enough Ukrainian refugees were “taken in”, so that the pressure of the Polish population on a peace in Ukraine is not too great. On the other hand, the “further directed” served to involve the other EU countries, especially Germany, as deeply as possible in this conflict; the refugees were used as an argument to justify intervention and as a kind of auxiliary force to strengthen one’s own position against Russia.
Just as, without the constant flow of money and weapons, the Kiev regime would long have been forced to return to reason, so the EU/NATO line has created the condition that the “normal” political consequences of a war in a neighboring country do not occur. This result seems only to be in the interest of the distributed refugees; objectively, it is to their detriment, unless one considers it the most desirable state to live outside one’s own country for a long time.
While a successful agreement in Istanbul in the spring of 2022 would have quickly turned the entire Ukraine conflict into a footnote of the year’s review, it is now largely excluded that the territory controlled by Kiev will be economically stable in the course of the next two generations. The “natural” pressure to find a solution has been eliminated; the consequences will be all the more lasting. No, not even the refugees themselves were done a favor, rather the company Rheinmetall and the United States.
These are the kind of political maneuvers, in which large crowds of people are used as pawns against their own interests, that stand behind the peculiar behavior of the German politics in the question of illegal immigration. If necessary, the public will again be presented with a fresh batch of sand in the eyes, with evening news reports that explain how hard, almost impossible it is to enforce the actually applicable law and with motions in the Bundestag that are planned from the start to fail. On the condition that at least the first prerequisite for a democratic decision, namely the complete information of the Germans themselves, is fulfilled, one will continue to wait in vain.