Germany is going to increase border controls in the wake of an August knife attack that claimed three lives in the town of Solingen.
With the stabbing, the government has been under pressure to impose stricter immigration laws. The stabbing suspect, a Syrian national, was on the verge of deportation following the rejection of his asylum application.
The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
The new restrictions, which will go into effect on September 16 and initially span six months, were revealed a few days after the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a party opposed to immigration, achieved significant gains in local elections.
Insisting that the government was “taking a hard line” against irregular migration, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said that the checks will lessen cross-border crime and Islamist radicalism.
“We are doing everything in our power to protect the people of our country against these threats,” she added.
Germany currently maintains controls, mostly spot inspections on roads and in trains, at its borders with Poland, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, and Austria to the east and south. Every border point will see the introduction of such procedures.
Critics countered that the action is more political than security-related.
The AfD’s triumph in regional elections in the east, when a far-right party topped a poll for the first time since the Nazi period, rocked Germany’s mainstream parties.
It seems that the ruling SPD and other mainstream parties interpreted the outcome as a call to arms from the electorate to impose stricter immigration and border controls.
In recent years, several Berlin administrations have let a comparatively high number of asylum seekers reside in the nation.
Germany took in more than one million people, mostly fleeing war in countries such as Syria during the 2015-2016 migrant crisis, and has received 1.2 million Ukrainians since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022.
But surveys suggest the AfD may do well in this weekend’s regional election in Brandenburg, so both center-left and center-right parties are formulating ideas that were unimaginable only a few weeks ago.
The CDU, the political party of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, has suggested sending all asylum applicants—even those who qualify—back to the border if they have passed through other secure EU nations.
Austria’s interior minister, Gerhard Karner, told the Bild newspaper on Monday that his nation would not accept any immigrants who were turned away by Germany.
“There’s no room for manoeuvre there,” he stated.
The administration of Chancellor Olaf Scholz has unveiled a number of immigration-related initiatives since the stabbing in Solingen.
Among them is altering the regulations to allow asylum seekers facing deportation to lose benefits and resuming the deportation of convicted Afghan criminals to their home country for the first time since the Taliban returned to power in 2021.
(BBC)
