Germany: How Germany deports Germans
01 September 1999
When Germany changed its citizenship law earlier this year, there were some who thought the practise of Jus sanguinis (defining nationality on grounds of the "blood" principle) was finally being abolished and with it, the old German classification of rights being based on ethnicity. Anti-deportation campaigns and anti-racists have found this to be unfounded.
Deportations of usually young "offenders", most of whom have been born and brought up in Germany and all of whom speak German as their mother tongue, have not only been continuing since the discussions on the new law (see Statewatch Vol 9 nos 2, 3 & 4), they have been steadily on the increase. At the same time, news coverage of these cases has dramatically declined. They are not seen as worth reporting any more, the shock effect has worn off.
The first case, which at the time created newspaper headlines for weeks as well as sparking off a heated public debate was that of "Mehmet". "Mehmet" is not actually the real name of the young Turkish German (born and brought up in Germany), who had committed a series of, sometimes serious, criminal offences. The name seems to be used by the German press as an acronym for any criminal Turkish-German adolescent. After a long legal battle around the "first Mehmet", the Bavarian Administrative Court decided not to extend the residency permit of the then 14-year old, paving the way for the deportation of a boy, who had never been to Turkey, whose parents were still living in Germany (although the court considered deporting them as well) and who was clearly German.
Since then, there has been a "second Mehmet". The 16-year old Goekay U was deported just like "Mehmet". He had also started to get into trouble for various offenses from the age of 11. All attempts to "integrate" him into society had failed, said public order spokesman Willi Reiser (CDU). After Goekay reached judicial responsibility at the age of 16, he received a juvenile sentence for offences ranging from grievous bodily harm to coercion and robbery, which led to his deportation in May this year by the city of Augsburg (Bavaria). Goekay has also been born and brought up in Germany, his mother tongue is German.
Unlike the first incident however, this very similar case was hardly mentioned in the local and regional news and the public debate was curiously missing. The Frankfurter Rundschau (FR) thinks that this is not only due to the "duplication effect", but because the partial resistance to the deportation of "Mehmet" had turned out to be a political disaster for the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland's (SPD). The party related its loss of 4% at the regional elections in Bavaria last Autumn to the fact that voters objected to their handling of the case, apparently denouncing them as "the Turks Party, which even defended that bastard". So this time, although the Greens conceded that "it is no solution to just deport the culprits", Green MP Christine Stahl also thought that the cases were not "entirely comparable", due to the age difference between the two deportees. Maybe the age of sixteen gives a green light for the deportation of young offenders born and brought up in Germany?
A more recent case which has gone entirely unnoticed, is now proving that Germany's deportation practices are extending to anyone, who has even the slightest contact with the criminal justice system and who can be classified as a foreigner. The latter, as the above cases portray, is not very difficult in Germany. Bruce B, an American national, is now sitting in a detention centre in Darmstadt. He was brought to Germany at the age of five by his mother, who became an alcoholic and drug addict and under whose care he remained until the age of eight. When social services took notice of him because he was absent from school, he was taken to a foster family, which broke up so that he had to be referred again. He then stayed with a second foster family for the next ten years, finished his<