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»The numbers have to come down.« This is the mantra we have been hearing for over a year now in response to the persistently high numbers of new arrivals in Germany seeking asylum. Nearly all political actors from one end of the country to the other have joined in the chorus. The EU-wide agreement on the reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), reached in May of 2024, promised quick relief from the perceived migration problem. Nevertheless, political actors – and not just those in Germany – have been falling all over themselves to offer ever more new proposals for tightening and regimenting the entry system.

»Many of the preventive measures that have been devised violate the law«

The political ideas put forward to reduce the numbers of new arrivals initially focused on access routes into the German entry system. Nationwide border controls are supposed to increase the number of those who are turned away, reduce human trafficking, and send a message of deterrence both to neighboring countries and the channels of communication used by potential new arrivals: We are closing!

The migration policies of the United Kingdom and Italy have attracted special attention. Those countries have taken it upon themselves to try to externalize asylum proceedings by transporting arriving asylum-seekers to third countries like Albania and Rwanda where their cases would then be adjudicated. The expectation is that most such appeals would be rejected and that the asylum-seekers would then be deported. This scheme ensures that the would-be migrants would not be able to claim asylum on the national territory of either Britain or Italy. The fact that many of these preventive measures violate the law and are consistently rejected by national and European courts does not faze proponents.

»Many of these preventive« measures violate the law.«

Control schemes like these continue to be hatched in Germany as well. They include the introduction of payment cards for asylum-seekers which would limit the options available to the them. Also, there have been discussions about canceling the services normally provided to asylum-seekers once their petitions have been rejected and they are obliged to leave the country. Those measure are being sold as deterrents, but at the same time they are tranquilizers for an aroused public opinion. Normally, all that asylum seekers are looking for is a chance to stand on their own two feet again and take control of their own lives. But everyone admits that in practice there are too few job opportunities out there that might restore to the often-traumatized entrants a sense of personal efficacy and structure.

A third front in this campaign seeks to increase the number of deportations. It’s here that public opinion is repeatedly whipped up into a frenzy by terrible crimes committed by individual asylum seekers, who frequently are among those whose petitions for protection have been rejected and who therefore are obliged to leave the country. Closer scrutiny of the biographies of such offenders usually reveals that existing legal options to deport them had not yet been exhausted. This was the case with the man who carried out a knife attack in the city of Aschaffenburg on January 22, killing two people.  As public officials make extra efforts to prove that they can and will take action, they often tend to deport »easy targets« who are close at hand--usually respectable people who do their jobs and are always trying to legalize their status within the German legal system’s complicated residency rules.

»The price will be paid by people whom the public views as potentially undesirable.«

On one hand, all of these political activities arise from an understandable desire to get ahead of the game in the field of »irregular« migration, which is so difficult to control. On the other hand, it stems from a motive based on the competition among political parties: the desperate attempt not to cede the issue of migration to the extreme right-wing fringe by showing that centrist parties actually can take decisive action and show toughness. In this context, the CDU’s resolution – Friedrich Merz’s five-point plan – introduced in the Bundestag on January 29, will deserve enduring notoriety. For the first time, it sought and won a majority to the right of the democratic center. On almost every page the Merz paper makes migration seems scandalous. Not only does it reveal the stereotypes held by its authors; it also stokes and encourages resentment among the anti-migration public. So, for now the price will be paid by people whom the public views as potentially undesirable. 

Political discourse thus systematically criminalizes people in need of protection, and that generates resonance waves throughout public opinion, expressed as hostility toward people who are perceived as migrants. Statistics furnished by victim counseling sites show that the number of violent racist acts in 2023 had increased by a third over the previous year! Agreement with statements indicative of group-related hostility (for example: »Foreigners come here only so they can exploit our welfare state« or »Muslims should not be allowed to emigrate to Germany«) is at an all-time high. By the same token, we can observe that the issue of migration is cited as the all-purose explanation for nearly every societal problem or failure in social policymaking. But is a focus on »migration« also the political solution for the visible and palpable construction sites at which our life-world is being built?

We can pursue that question by looking into another prominent discursive field closely linked to the perceived »asylum problem:« one that furnishes a key argument for the aforementioned initiatives in favor of externalization and control: the claim that local governments are overextended. This is the case because cities and municipalities are responsible for taking in asylum-seekers, whereas asylum procedures are in the hands of the Federal Government. Local governments‹ responsibilities cannot simply be reduced to the issue of how to house migrants. They include every stage of the integration process, starting with setting up a range of services including counseling, integration plans for younger and older children in schools, and including support for access to more advanced training and to the labor market itself for adult refugees. 

»Local governments have been signaling to federal-level political discourses that they are overwhelmed.«

After the so-called »long summer« of migration in 2015, infrastructures were created and expanded throughout the country to meet the needs to which this influx gave rise. In the years that followed, the number of new arrivals declined and the corresponding infrastructures were dismantled. The coronavirus epidemic of 2020 – 2022 caused a further drop in the number if migrants. And because the focus shifted so much toward pandemic management and social distancing measures, the numbers of both full-time personnel and volunteers involved in infrastructure work also fell. But then rapidly rising numbers of Ukrainians seeking protection as well as a new wave of asylum seekers beginning in 2022 – 23, put extra stress on the now-weakened infrastructure. Since then, local governments have been signaling to the federal-level political discourse that they are overwhelmed, especially when it comes to lodging the new arrivals, but also in all the downstream areas of integration management. Furthermore, many people prefer to oversimplify those signals that the municipalities are overburdened and to externalize the quest for solutions. Surveys suggest that signs of overextension coming from local governments are not the same everywhere in the country. And it is questionable that those local-level problems would be solved by decreasing the number of asylum-seekers, however that reduction might be accomplished.

What does the research show?

Ten years of social-scientific research done in conjunction with the intake of refugees makes it possible today to draw a more nuanced picture of the phenomenon and to deduce from it guidelines for action. Those guidelines apply primarily to the situation in local governments, in which – as if through a magnifying glass – the complexity of the situation becomes evident. One thing is clear: many of the systemic deficiencies in the entry infrastructure cannot be rectified from one day to the next. For example, the lack of options for housing new arrivals, especially once the reception process has been completed, reflect basic problems in the real estate market and the supply of public (»social«) housing. There are no quick fixes here. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable and logical to suppose that a faster »release« of refugees from the intake system might reduce the lodging problems. 

The considerable number of work-migrants may serve as a basis for comparison. Every year many of them travel to the Federal Republic and find a place to live on their own, although sometimes they are assisted by their future employers. Greater flexibility also would be helpful wherever paths to the integration of refugees are being slowed down by systemic inertia. Flexibility can be achieved in a variety of ways: greater mobility in the choice of place of residence, easier access to the labor market, quicker recognition of the refugees‹ professional qualifications or in the certification of their language skills. Basically, the emphasis in political action should always be on enabling rather than on preventing. And one should never forget that the refuges have agency; they should be encouraged to take the initiative. 

»Options for problem-solving also may be found through improved coordination among different levels of governance.«

It would be desirable if people engaging in public and political discourse would think much harder about examples of »best practices,« from which a lot can be learned, rather than focusing on bad practices, which reassure them that a task can never be successfully completed. First, if they focused on best practices, they would soon realize that problems are articulated very differently at the local level and that the spectrum of local resources varies widely. For those reasons, many different approaches may exist parallel to one another. Second, by consulting best practices, one would learn that options for problem-solving also may be found through improved coordination among the different levels of governance, since it often happens that these levels work more against than with each other. That causes a great deal of frustration among those who do integration work on the ground. Border closures don’t help here! On the contrary, consistent and sustainable support for local-level arrival and integration infrastructures is what we need, and political majorities have to be found to make that happen. 

In conclusion, we should keep in mind that a great deal must change in the field of humanitarian migration. In Germany, actors have the power to shape outcomes principally in cases involving the integration of and participation by those seeking protection. This agency should be exercised consistently and constructively. However, when the dimension of externalization comes into play and with it the understandable desire to offer a reduction in arrival numbers as a solution to the problem, it ought to be clear that this can work only within the joint framework of the European asylum system, which entails the cooperation of all EU member states. Political energy that concentrates on solidarity-inspired interactions within the EU, as well as between it and other international actors, is energy well-invested. Only a joint international effort might enable us to counter the global exodus precipitated by social inequality around the world, cemented by history, and intensified by wars and climate catastrophes.