Germany implements border checks as migration debate stirs election tensions

By Henry Ridgwell September 16, 2024

Germany began implementing checks on all its land borders from Monday as the government tries to reduce the number of asylum seekers and irregular migrants entering the country.

Several countries that share borders with Germany have criticized the plan, which they say undermines freedom of movement, widely seen as a core principle of the European Union.

Spot checks

German police and border guards set up check points at major road crossings from midnight. Officers also boarded trains, trams and ferries arriving from neighboring countries, conducting spot checks on passengers suspected of being illegal migrants.

"The checks are targeted at vehicles where we suspect illegal migration," said German federal police spokesperson Dieter Hutt during a meeting with reporters in the German town of Kehl, which lies across the border from the French city of Strasbourg.

"Our controls are very flexible and dependent on the situation, which means that we are not setting up the classic border post and that we do not check every vehicle or every person," he said.

Authorities have said the border checks would stay in place for at least six months.

However, Germany's Interior Minister Nancy Faeser has also said the checks would remain until the EU's new bloc-wide regulations on asylum and migration come into force. The deal, agreed between members states in May this year, is not due to become operational until July 2026 at the earliest, and still faces numerous political and practical hurdles.

Schengen zone

Germany is part of Europe's Schengen zone, which purportedly allows freedom of movement without a passport across 29 European countries. However, its members can introduce border checks if there is a serious threat to public policy or internal security.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said the move was necessary.

"The number of those (migrants) who come to Germany irregularly is too large. And it is therefore in the understandable interest of the German government to ensure that we get these things under control through good management of irregular migration," Scholz said at a press conference Sunday during a visit to Uzbekistan.

Voter backlash

Germany took in more than a million migrants in 2015 in the wake of the Arab Spring, mainly from countries in the Middle East and North Africa. It is also hosting more than a million Ukrainian refugees who have fled Russia's invasion.

The influx has prompted a backlash from some voters, who have turned to the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party, which scored a shock victory in recent regional elections. The party is hoping for a similar result in the upcoming Brandenburg state election on September 22.

A terrorist attack by a failed Syrian asylum seeker last month in the town of Solingen, which left three people dead, added pressure on the government to act.

Critics say Germany's coalition government is pandering to the far right.

"We are really deeply concerned about the developments because we can see that almost nothing counts in the asylum debate anymore," said Judith Wiebke of the human rights group Pro-Asyl.

"From our point of view, this is of course part of a development where populists on the right are trying to divide society and question our pillars of society such as the rule of law, democracy and human rights," Wiebke told Reuters.

European unity

Many of Germany's European neighbors have also reacted with anger to the border checks. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk accused Scholz of sacrificing European principles. "I have no doubt that it is the internal, political situation in Germany which is causing these steps to be implemented, and not our policy towards illegal immigration on our borders," Tusk said last week, after Germany announced the new border checks.

The border checks could undermine European unity, said Raphael Bossong, a migration affairs analyst with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

"There is a strong risk that we're never going to hit that moment where anybody is going to be ready to take the stage and say 'Yes, now European borders are secure enough, now we're satisfied with the common European asylum system, and that's why we're scaling back that controls.'"

"It could aggravate a trend of mutual recriminations (among EU member states), the rise of hard right and seriously Eurosceptic countries. And we don't know where we end up with this kind of trend. So long term I think it adds to a number of risks to the European integration process," Bossong told VOA.

Migration clampdown

The border checks are part of a wider package to clamp down on irregular migration. Germany is also stepping up deportations of failed asylum seekers, including to Afghanistan. Berlin is also seeking to return more migrants to the countries where they first entered the EU, where they are meant to apply for asylum under the bloc's rules - although Austria has already refused to comply.

Will the crackdown reduce immigration? It's a complex issue, said Bossong."We're not dealing with parcels or containers. We're dealing with people. And we're also dealing with a lot of different drivers of irregular migration. Yes, some may be susceptible to different incentives or different controls, others may be less so, looking at various wars and conflict in our European neighborhood. And these are not under our control."

Rwanda deal

Meanwhile a government official recently said that Germany could seek to strike a deal with Rwanda to send asylum seekers there for processing, using existing facilities.

Joachim Stamp, who is Germany's special representative for migration agreements and also a member of the Free Democratic Party, part of the coalition government, said the United Nations could oversee a scheme that would use the existing asylum facilities in Rwanda. "We currently have no (third) country that has come forward, with the exception of Rwanda," Stamp told a Table Media podcast on September 6.

Britain negotiated a similar plan in 2022, but it was ruled unlawful and finally abandoned by the incoming Labour government in July.

Scholz has previously rejected the idea of processing undocumented migrants in third countries, such as Rwanda.