In order to achieve sustainable control and limitation of migration, the President of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), Hans-Eckhard Sommer, is necessary to change a radical course. It is wrong to adhere to the individual asylum law and to hope for positive effects of the reform of the common European asylum system (GEAS), Sommer said in a speech to participants in an event of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation on the future of asylum law.
According to his words, it would make more sense to replace the current system “in considerable amounts” through humanitarian recordings. In addition to humanitarian points of view, the integration ability of the labor market can also play a role here. Anyone who is still unauthorized to enter Germany would then have no view of a right to stay.
Summer: laws and contracts can be changed
“Politics can do a lot if she only wants,” said Sommer when asked by a participant to feasibility his proposal. After all, the majority had recently changed at European level. International contracts such as the Geneva Refugee Convention could also be changed. You have to “free yourself from old thinking schemes,” said Sommer. With a view to the rise of populist and right -wing extremists in Europe, one should not hide the fact that the democratic constitutional state “can also perish on this topic”.
Sommer emphasized that he does not think his lecture as a BAMF president. Rather, he is concerned with presenting his “personal assessment” and a summary of his experience.
Third-countries not a solution
The current European system is cynical, he said. It is particularly popular with young men from the middle class, while women, the sick and families often have no chance of getting to Europe. The demand for “protection of the borders” only reveals helplessness. The outsourcing of asylum procedures in third countries proposed by some politicians as a measure to limit escape migration to Germany is “not a realistic option” from the point of view of summer.
In 2024, a total of 229,751 people submitted an asylum application for the first time in Germany. There were also 21,194 asylum applications. The number of applications decreased by 30.2 percent compared to the previous year. One main cause of this decline is that Serbia actually blocked the route to Hungary in November 2023, said Sommer. It is open whether this will remain so permanently.