Germany’s new citizenship law took effect on June 27, and there are some major improvements for Ausländer*innen. People can apply for a German passport after five instead of eight years, and dual citizenship is now generally accepted. This law, passed by the self-described »progress coalition« of SPD, Greens, and FDP, has taken Germany a small step away from “Blut und Boden” ideology and towards modernity.
For the conservatives and the Far Right, the changes mean that German passports are practically being given away at a clearance sale: Alexander Dobrindt of the Bavarian conservative party CSU used the term “verramschen”, while other CSU politicians have said immigrants need to “earn” their passports.
Even in my circles, I’ve heard liberals wonder if five years might be too quick. It’s always weird to be the lone foreigner in this kind of conversation. Do all these immigrants deserve full rights? Of course they don’t mean me – they were picturing those other, “dangerous” immigrants.
In our world, organized into capitalist nation-states, a person’s most basic rights are dependent on a state being willing to recognize them. Not having citizenship in the place you live means you can’t always feel truly safe in your home, and you can’t express your opinion the way others can. Do most people know what that feels like?
I was part of a tranche of Americans who got dual citizenship via a legal loophole almost a decade ago. Before that, I spent many years in Germany without as a foreigner. Even though I didn’t experience too much discrimination, it is an enormous burden to know that a faceless bureaucrat could expel you from your home with a stroke of a pen.
I always wonder: What did these right-wing politicians do, exactly, to »earn« their own passport, on the very day they were born? The idea that people’s rights should depend on the coincidence of birth is the very definition of racism.
To make the racism a bit less obvious, they say this is a question of “recognizing our values”, as if immigrants were a threat to democracy. As nd has reported, German authorities have been working hard to deport people accused of “antisemitism” for taking part in demonstrations against Germany’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
This is all rather rich coming from the CSU, who are currently in a coalition with Hubert Aiwanger, despite the fact that he was involved with an antisemitic leaflet (that his brother took responsibility for). In fact: White Germans seem to be far more likely to support so-called extremism than immigrants are. There are thousands of violent Nazis living in Germany, and I haven’t heard anyone call for them to be deported to Afghanistan. (Who would take them, anyway?)
An easy way to fight the AfD would be to give voting rights to everyone living in Germany. At the moment, 23 percent of adults in Berlin can’t vote. Can we really call it a democracy when so many people who are living in Germany are excluded because they don’t have the right citizenship?
At the risk of being called a dangerous extremist, I think absolutely everyone deserves the same basic democratic rights. The new law makes things a bit less undemocratic. But in the end, democracy means that everyone has an equal say. So yes, by all means, give those German passports away.
This is a mirror of Nathaniel’s Red Flag column in Neues Deutschland
