Amnesty warns of immigration abuse in "fight against terrorism"
01 March 2004
The German political climate has never been particularly open to immigration debates. Conservative politicians are now resisting more liberal labour schemes with openly racist slogans such as Kinder statt Inder (children instead of Indians), referring to white German children and Indian experts who were invited under a government scheme to work in Germany to fill vacancies in the IT sector. Germany is trying to implement the liberalisation of its immigration laws to allow for the flexible migration of skilled workers whilst at the same time restricting immigration as a whole, in particular undocumented immigration. It is also increasing its powers to deport. This "managed migration approach" was first openly propagated at EU level through the Vitorino paper on immigration (COM(2000) 757 final, 22.11.2000) and it has been pursued in Germany at least since February 2000 with Schröder's Greencard announcement that was the first official admission by government that immigration was necessary for the economy.
At the end of 2001, Interior Minister, Otto Schily, presented an Immigration Bill that, despite earlier promises of liberalisation turned out to discriminate against every immigrant except the highly skilled one. The white paper lowers the age of family reunion from 16 to 12 years, excludes asylum seekers from basic civil rights, denies the regularisation of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million undocumented migrants living in Germany, abolishes the current temporary residency status - Duldung - which "tolerates" people on humanitarian grounds (which confronts around 250,000 asylum seekers with the possibility of deportation) and facilitates deportation and detention through accelerating the asylum procedure (see Statewatch vol 11 no 5). Despite the restrictive tone of the law, the coalition government (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands and Die Grünen - Social Democrats and Green Party) has been in continuous argument with the conservative opposition (Christlich Demokratische Union and Christlich Soziale Union - conservative christian parties from North and South Germany) on several issues. The dispute was reflected in the initial passing of the law being declared invalid by the Federal Constitutional Court on 18 December 2002 on the grounds of formal irregularities in the voting procedure of the Lower House. This led to the white paper being reintroduced by the government at the beginning of 2003.
In addition to the ongoing demand by the Conservatives to make the law more restrictive than it already is, Amnesty International and six church and refugee NGO's have written an open letter to the parliamentary committee in protest at the recent turn in the debate to focus on security measures and terrorism. The letter says that in light of the Madrid bombings, the white paper is being abused by political parties to present a hard line on terrorism: first Conservatives, and now interior minister Schily are proposing to include increased deportation and "security detention" powers into the law.
The white paper has been debated by a parliamentary committee for the last year. The Vermittlungsausschuss is set up automatically when Lower House proposals are rejected by the Upper House and no agreement can be reached. The argument revolves around promoting labour migration, improving humanitarian protection for refugees and integration measures and can be summarised as follows:
i. integration: the white paper demands mandatory participation in German language courses for foreigners who do not speak German. The Conservatives want to introduce sanctions for failure to attend courses and make foreigners pay for the courses as well.
ii. labour migration: the government is currently giving in to Conservative demands to abolish the proposed point system, which allows for the immigration of people who fulfil certain criteria (ie. age, qualification, language skills) without being linked to a specific e