The Development of the German Immigration Policy after 2015

a Balancing Act between Populism and EU Policy

Abstract

Germany is seen and presented by itself as a welcome country. It is a country of immigration. First, there was the “Gastarbeiter” period when within agreements made by Germany and southern European states several thousand worker arrived in Germany and most of them made the country their permanent home. The country experienced another migration wave when the former Central-European countries became members of the European Union. In 2015, similar to other European States, Germany too experienced a migration-shock which resulted in a political-social turmoil in the German society. Not only politicians, but average people faced the same never-seen-before challenge on different levels, due to the number of migrants arriving in short term onto the territory of the state: one in the everyday life of its community, one in the political and legal perspective. Irrespectively of their reactions or adaptation methods, one common point of these actors was that they had to come to terms with the fact that a huge number of irregular migrants will stay long-term in Germany. However, the wave challenged the “welcome” country attitude both at political and at societal level. The author argues that roles, namely, the country affected by the migration wave, and the country being a leading European Union Member State became contradicted because of the measures introduced after 2015. This is underlined by the normative analysis of the main measures in this article, but because migration policy overlaps other policy areas, for example integration policy, interior policy, these measures touch upon different issues.