By Gunnar Schupelius
A member of the Bundestag is defamed and insulted. For an asylum proposal that has been well thought out and that urgently needs to be discussed, says Gunnar Schupelius.
MP Thorsten Frei (CDU) has proposed abolishing the individual right to asylum in Europe and replacing it with quotas. That would be a radical departure from previous policies.
Currently, anyone who has made it to an EU country can apply for asylum, regardless of whether they are a refugee or not. Then he can stay until his entitlement has been verified.
According to Frei’s proposal, this right will be abolished and asylum seekers will be turned away. In return, the EU countries undertake to voluntarily take in a certain number of refugees from crisis areas each year.
Thorsten Frei is the parliamentary manager of the Union faction in the Bundestag, in other words in a high post, his word carries weight. His proposal was immediately rejected by the governing parties and described as “right-wing populism”. There was no fair argument.
Frei has broken a taboo that is otherwise only touched upon by the AfD: He fundamentally questions the right to asylum, which is enshrined in Germany’s Basic Law. For this he is insulted, suspected and convicted.
In fact, however, it only picks up on a debate that took place 30 years ago. At that time, the right to asylum was already being fundamentally questioned. A civil war was raging in the former Yugoslavia, many Bosnians, Kosovar Albanians, Serbs and Croats came to Germany. The social systems were, as they are today, overburdened. In 1993, the CDU ensured that the basic right to asylum was significantly restricted. The SPD agreed and so the Basic Law could be changed.
Since then, Article 16a has stated that anyone who immigrated via a “safe third country” is no longer entitled to asylum. Anyone who comes to Germany from another EU country or from a country where there is no persecution should be turned away.
This “third-country solution” from 1993 has not worked to this day, because a little later the “Schengen Agreement” came into force and border controls were abolished. Article 16a was difficult to enforce and was torpedoed by the Merkel government in 2015, which refused to reject hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers from safe third countries.
April 2023, off the Italian island of Lampedusa: A rubber boat with migrants and refugees is recovered by rescuers Photo: dpa/picture-alliance/ropi
Since then, all attempts to enforce the right to asylum have failed. Millions of people applied for asylum in Germany who should have been turned away. So it is only logical to change the laws again. All the politicians from the traffic light coalition, who are now howling and putting Thorsten Frei in the right-hand corner, know that too. You should talk about the proposal.
The right to asylum is used en masse for illegal immigration. The federal government has stated the same thing. Germany needs to control immigration and decide how many refugees it can and wants to take in.
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