Overview
- Following Friedrich Merz’s claim that Germany had largely solved the migration challenge, police union leaders and migration-law scholar Daniel Thym said the core problems remain.
- Applications fell to a little over 168,000 over the past year, and police leaders credit tougher border checks ordered by Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt for the drop.
- Heiko Teggatz of the DPolG and Manuel Ostermann of the federal police union argue the weak link is deportations, which they describe as piecemeal and inconsistent.
- Thym details why removals struggle to work in practice, citing more than 500 local immigration offices, mismatched IT systems, and court cases that often run for a year or longer.
- EU asylum law also constrains national action, and FOCUS Online’s Ulrich Reitz calls Merz’s statement misleading, warning it risks inflating public expectations the system cannot meet.