In the face of escalating migrant crime and dimming electoral prospects, the German political establishment finally conclude that mass migration may not be so great after all

Das schaffen wir nicht mehr.

It feels so, so good to be back. And, as usually happens upon returning from a brief internet break, there is no end of things to write about.

The main thing is the second assassination attempt against Donald Trump, just nine weeks after the first. A very strange man named Ryan Wesley Routh allegedly hid in the bushes with a rifle while the forty-fifth President was playing golf in West Palm Beach yesterday afternoon. He got off several shots before the Secret Service returned fire. He later fled and was arrested. There will obviously be much more to say about this in the coming days.

A secondary, more amusing matter, is the resignation of that enormously irritating EU Commissioner Thierry Breton. This is the man best known for the threats he sent to Elon Musk last month, after Musk dared to organise a Twitter space with Trump. As I noted earlier, Breton has long been loathed even within the Eurocracy as an egotistical self-promoter. His resignation comes after Ursula von der Leyen asked Emmanuel Macron to nominate somebody else for his post. The most hilarious thing is that Breton posted his resignation directly to Twitter – the website that he believes is a grave threat to European democracy, but from which he cannot disentangle himself, because it is also such a great source of attention for mediocre losers like him.

There are other matters too, but before I can get to any of them, I must get this piece on the changing politics of mass migration in Germany off my chest. This is the most important issue facing Europe right now – more important than the folly of the energy transition, more crucial even than the fading memory of pandemic repression.

For nearly ten years, migration has felt like one of the most intractable problems in our entire political system. However crazy the policies, however contradictory and irrational, there was always only the towering mute wall of establishment indifference. It felt like the borders would be open forever, that we would have to sing vapid rainbow hymns to the virtues of diversity and inclusivity for the rest of our lives.

Suddenly, it no longer feels like that. Over the past weeks, a perfect storm of escalating migrant violence and electoral upsets in East Germany have changed the discourse utterly.

The cynical among you will say that none of this matters, that the migrants are still coming, that our borders are still open, and of course that’s true – as far as it goes. But it’s also true that there’s an order of operations here. A lot of things have to happen before we can turn return to a regime of normal border security, and I suspect they have to happen in a specific sequence: 1) Migrationist political parties have to feel electoral pressure and taste defeat at the ballot box first of all. 2) Then, as the establishment realises they are up against the limits of their ability to manipulate public opinion, the discourse around mass migration will have to shift, to deprive opposition parties of Alternative für Deutschland of their political advantage. Specifically, the lunatic oblivious press must begin to question the wisdom of allowing millions of unidentified foreigners to take up residence in our countries. This will then open the way for 3) the judiciary to revise their understanding of asylum policies and begin to interpret our laws in more rational, sustainable ways.

In Thüringen and Saxony, we have already had the electoral defeat of 1), and we will soon have more of it in Brandenburg. As a consequence of 1), we are now seeing some powerful glimmerings of 2). This is very important, because as the press expands the realm of acceptable discourse, a great many heretofore tabu thoughts and opinions are becoming irreversibly and indelibly conceivable.

Ten years ago, diversity was our strength, infinity refugees were our moral obligation and there were no limits to how many asylees we could absorb. Since August, not only Alternative für Deutschland but also that offshoot from the Left Party known as the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, the centre-right Christian Democrats, a substantial centrist faction of the Social Democrats, and many others beyond whatever “the extreme right” is supposed to be, agree that migration is in fact an enormous problem. They also agree that our moral obligations to the world’s poor and disadvantaged are finite, and that there are indeed clear limits to the number of asylees Germany can support. What is more, they are saying all of these things in the open.

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To understand what is happening and what is at stake, we must review the dynamics of mass migration to Europe. They go something like this:

First, the European Union cannot effectively stop migrants from the developing world at its own borders. The reasons – whether the Eurocrats can’t, or they won’t, or they don’t care, or they don’t know how, or they haven’t been sufficiently incentivised – don’t really matter.

What does matter, is the fact that the failure of of the Eurocracy to limit migration is gradually undermining the credibility of the EU itself. This is because nation states are much better at border security than international bureaucratic behemoths. Should a major EU member state decide that it has had enough of mass migration and elect to close its borders, the migrant pressure on other EU states would increase.

These other states would then have a powerful motivation to take a similarly hard line, and there would be a chain reaction – a race to the bottom, in which EU nations strive to outcompete each other in disincentivising migration and sealing their borders against asylees. A sufficiently fierce reaction could substantially undermine the authority of the EU itself, and would certainly spell the end of the Schengen Arrangement.

Germany, despite all its recent crises and setbacks, is still the dominant industrial nation of the EU, and also its most populous state. By keeping its borders open and enticing migrants with generous benefits, Germany hopes to reduce migrant pressure on its neighbours and prevent the anti-migration chain reaction from getting off the ground. This is why German politicians are so quick to equate any flavour of migration restrictionism with hostility to the EU. Smaller countries like Denmark and Hungary can shut their doors to migrants, because the added pressure on the rest of Europe is minimal. Germany, however, is different; the structural integrity of the entire system depends on German borders remaining open.

The problem is that the snake has begun to eat its own tail. The energy crisis and the lunatic anti-nuclear and anti-carbon radicalism of the Greens have taken a huge bite out of German prosperity. Open borders have lost their appeal, Alternative für Deutschland are pounding at the door, and no amount of staged public freakouts about “the extreme right” can restore the balance.

Look at the polls: Fully 82% of West Germans and 84% of East Germans believe the state should limit migration. A majority across almost every major party, including 55% of Green voters, agree that migration must be restricted.¹ Huge majorities of East and West Germans support deporting criminal migrants, reducing the benefits of asylees whose applications have been rejected, weakening family reunification provisions and cutting down the potential pool of asylees by increasing the number of those nations designated as secure countries of origin. On many of these issues you see a general convergence of opinion, with West Germans gradually adopting the anti-migration views of their supposedly backward and anti-democratic East German counterparts, who in this area as in many others are simply less prosperous, less insulated from geopolitical trends and therefore more likely to be at the forward edge of political opinion.

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In the end, it was the Islamist knife attack at the ‘Diversity Festival’ in Solingen that became the tipping point. The attacker, a Syrian asylum seeker named Issa al Hassan, was supposed to have been deported to Bulgaria, because that is the country where he first set foot on EU soil. Al Hassan, however, managed to avoid deportation by refusing to answer his door for a few months; our police, after all, had no particular interest in deporting him or anybody else. As a result, three people are dead. In the wake of AfD success in the Thuringian and Saxon elections, al Hassan has become a powerful signal of failed migration policy in Germany more generally. Suddenly a lot of people want to know why people like al-Hassan are even here, why they can’t be deported, and whose fault this entire mess may be.

Today, Germany begins spot-checking for illegal migration across all national borders. Our Interior Minister, Nancy Faeser, announced the policy in a direct response to the Solingen scandal. She justified this emergency measure last Monday in a letter to the EU Commission, stating that Germany’s resources are “nearly exhausted” and that the present refugee burden has brought the state “to the limits of what it can afford.”

“The provision of additional accommodation is not possible without limits,” Faeser wrote … “No state in the world can receive an unlimited number of refugees.” She added that the migratory pressure is expected to “remain unrelentingly high”.

“In addition to the dangers posed by Islamist terrorism, recent incidents of knife crime and other violent crime by refugees have led to a massive impairment of the sense of security and inner peace,” Faeser continued. She also criticised “the increasing dysfunctionality” of the so-called Dublin System in Europe – the agreement that refugees must apply for asylum in the country where they first set foot on European soil. The minister called on Brussels “to continue to work energetically and vigorously together to achieve visible and rapid progress here.”

The border checks are not nearly enough, and for once our politicians are not even pretending that they are. The parties of our coalition government are desperate to achieve some agreement about limiting migration with the parliamentary opposition, meaning the centre-right Christian Democrats. The latter, sounding increasingly like Alternative für Deutschland, are demanding the blunt pushback of asylees at the German border if they have crossed through another European country to get here. In practice, this would entail a rejection of nearly all asylum applicants, because it is very hard for refugees to get to Germany without travelling through some other EU state.

Now, the CDU are not acting out of moral conviction. They are political opportunists who bear direct responsibility for the present migrant crisis, and they would just as soon close the borders as open them even wider than Merkel did in 2015, if only it served their interests. At the same time, their opportunism in the face of changing political winds has altered the discourse forever, and that really does matter.

According to media reports, Chancellor Olaf Scholz told the CDU that “he would prefer to reduce illegal migration to zero.” The CDU, however, ultimately broke off negotiations, because Scholz’s government doubted that courts would support a rejection of asylees en masse. The offered to try blanket rejections at a few trial locations, to see how judges would react, but the CDU refused. They said they do not want legal experiments; rather, they want to send a signal to the migrant hordes – specifically one that “would be the opposite of the signal sent in 2015,” when their own former Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed the peoples of the third world to Germany. After the CDU left the negotiating table, establishment media began their typical whining, outdone only by Chancellor Scholz’s amazing speech to the German Bundestag, in which he shouted and ranted about the intransigence of the Christian Democrats over many minutes, like a man with his back to the wall.

After Scholz finished throwing his tantrum in the Bundestag, the right-populist government of the Netherlands announced that they wished to implement the comprehensive pushback of asylees on their own borders:

Marjolein Faber, the asylum minister of [Geert] Wilders’s Party for Freedom (PVV), wants to take unusual measures to minimise the influx of asylum seekers and migrants. She aims to create “the strictest asylum regime of all time” and make the Netherlands a pioneer in strict migration policy.

To this end, the Dutch government first wants to declare a crisis that would enable it to suspend laws without the approval of parliament temporarily and to govern by “royal decree.” New legislation would then follow. According to the government plan, this emergency measure would … initially prevent the start of new asylum procedures and restrict the family reunification of already recognised refugees.

Refugees are to be housed in a few large centres and provided only with the necessities of life. The new government no longer wants to grant asylum for an unlimited period and, like Germany, wants to control the borders more strictly. At the EU level, the Netherlands also wants an opt-out clause that would allow it to not implement common EU legislation.

German state media are fighting very hard to cast the Dutch plans as a crazy example right-wing extremism, but in the new discourse that is very hard. Substantial portions of the relentlessly progressive, democratic and antifascist German political establishment are at this very moment demanding pretty much the same thing.

Naturally, the left are having a very big sad about all of this. On Saturday, that cut-rate German Guardian known as taz ran a piece screaming that “My Germany is staying open.” “The asylum debate is getting more intense,” they wrote. “Human rights are at stake.” To defend these rights, they assembled 32 astoundingly vapid pro-migration statements from various “celebrities,” who insisted over and over that “diversity is our greatest strength,” that migration is necessary to prevent Germany from becoming “grey and brown” (that is, old and fascist), that “It is not an achievement to live where you live,” that “we need further immigration to develop culturally, intellectually and spiritually,” that we need “to see each individual as a human being,” that “society needs to develop a completely different, positive sense of cooperation,” and that “an open society is the best protection for our democracy and humanity.” If you had asked me to compose an extended parody of migrationist drivel, I could not do any better than this. The fuzzy buzzwords, the vague moral appeals, and the absence of any concrete argument are all the unmistakable symptoms of a sclerotic and defunct ideology that has come to the end of itself.

1. Of all major parties, only Die Linke (the Left Party) has a minority in favour of migration restriction. The reason is that the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, which split off from Die Linke, took all the migration restrictionists with them.