Do the SPD want to be part of the same club as Viktor Orbán? If you asked them, they’d probably say they don’t. But actions speak louder than words, and Orbán himself knows that: on September 10th, he welcomed Chancellor Olaf Scholz “to the club.” Which club? #StopMigration. Scholz was admitted to this less and less exclusive club because of Germany’s decision to reinstate controls on all its land borders starting September 16th.
In the European Parliament, the SPD and Orban’s Fidesz are part of political groups that claim to have little, if anything to do with one another. But Orbán is right to recognize what so many critical commentators have been saying for years, European migration policies and discourses are moving dramatically to his side of the political spectrum, regardless of who is implementing them. German border controls are only the most recent example.
Permanent crisis
When the SPD Federal Minister for the Interior, Nancy Faeser, announced that Germany will impose border control in the heart of the Schengen free-movement area, this came as a shock, but not a surprise. The move might be unprecedented in terms of scale, but it follows measures and declarations that have become increasingly strict and violent. Germany’s parties have been trying to manage the rise of the AfD by imitating its anti-migration stance. Although this strategy has been failing miserably, some still hold on to very dangerously misplaced hopes.
The SPD continue their attempt to lure the AfD’s voter base by promising that they, too, can be hard on immigration. Scholz’s promise to “deport on a massive scale,” made in October 2023, has not been empty. In the first half of 2024, Germany deported 30% more people than in the same period of 2023. The new “Repatriation Improvement Act” made proceedings harsher and faster, leading to the first deportations to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
All of these measures are legitimated by the invocation of security. Germany’s Islamophobic response to the genocide in Gaza made the Schengen border an important tool for policing and oppressing pro-Palestine activists. The knife attack that happened in Solingen on August 23rd, claimed by the Islamic State, brought a new wave of racist moral panic about the dangers of immigration in Germany. Although the number of people seeking asylum in the country has been decreasing, Germany’s borders are supposed to be in a state of emergency, and the situation calls for emergency measures.
According to its various governments, however, Germany has been in a continuous migration crisis for the last 50 years. Measures to combat this crisis are also nothing new. The border controls announced by Faeser are exceptional in name only; controls have been put in place at Germany’s border’s 44 times since 2015. In 2023 alone, those entering Germany from Austria, Poland, Czechia or Switzerland had to go through border checks for a total of 43 weeks.
Not that border controls affect all equally. Faced with criticisms that the new measures will unacceptably slow down traffic and trade, the German government already announced that its border checks are mobile and flexible. They do not target all commuters and travelers, according to a spokesperson from the Ministry of Interior, but only cars where officers notice “hints of people smugglers and cross-border crime.” This is being presented as Germany minimizing the effect that its new measures will have on freedom of movement, but critics have already noted what such “smart controls” will most likely mean: racial profiling and increased abuse against people of color entering Germany.
The fact that the SPD is borrowing from the right’s playbook while claiming to fight it is not the only apparent contradiction in Germany’s migration policy. The newest crackdowns come at a time when migrants are more important to the country’s economic development than ever. Just two days after Faeser’s announcement, the Federal Statistical Office released a report that showed a 25% increase in the recognition of foreign professional qualifications in 2023. It is not only skilled immigration that keeps the German economy running, poor Eastern Europeans are still overworked and underpaid on German farms. Another recent report showed that the second quarter in 2024 saw a record of worked hours in Germany, due in no small part to migrant labor.
As many Germans age out of employment, more and more foreign workers are needed to keep the country afloat and to ensure their retirement. The SPD is, of course, aware of this. Olaf Scholz did not stay at home to see the border controls come into force but was hard at work in Central Asia to solve Germany’s labor and migration problems. On September 15, he signed a bilateral migration deal with Uzbekistan, just one of a recent series of such agreements with Colombia, India, Georgia, Kenya, and Morocco. Besides making the immigration of skilled labor easier, all these agreements also include provisions for facilitating deportation procedures.
Attracting non-European labor force is not a move to increase the freedom of movement, but to make borders stronger as useful tools for racial capitalism. Fortress Europe, of which Germany is a core part, does not only keep people out, but enforces selective admission and control. The border is an instrument of differentiation between good and bad migrants. Good migrants need to be afraid of becoming bad migrants, and stay in their lane as productive, obedient capitalist subjects. There is no contradiction between sharpened border controls and increased reliance on migrant labor. Rather, the former makes the latter possible.
The perversion of solidarity
That is why, although the German border controls have caused a heated debate in European politics, both sides of these discussions are equally hostile to migrants and refugees. The other members of the #StopMigration club are all taking similar, or more drastic measures. Gerd Wilders’s reaction to the news was “If Germany can do it, why can’t we?” and the Netherlands’ government already claimed its own migration emergency and requested to opt out of EU asylum rules. Hungary followed suit while pointing out the hypocrisy of EU attempts to punish its own enforcement of border security while “no one says a word about” Germany’s border checks.
Most importantly, Scholz has the support of the European trendsetter in migration politics. Giorgia Meloni’s government expressed glee at the sight of (allegedly) left-wing parties becoming more aligned with Italy’s own approach to immigration. The appreciation is mutual. Italy’s crackdown on immigration and its project of processing asylum requests in Albania attracted praise from politicians throughout Europe, including Scholz himself, and ensured Meloni’s influence on EU migration policy.
While the Albanian project has not yet been put in practice, the EU has been externalizing its borders to Africa for years. European technology and funds are used by border guards and police forces in places such as Senegal to stop migrants’ journey to Europe, leading to the militarization of African borders and human rights abuses. Italy has been at the forefront of outsourcing European border security to Tunisia, where sub-Saharan migrants trying to reach the Mediterranean are now subject to horrible violence.
So, is the criciticism from other politicians towards Germany’s latest border measures driven by an outrage at the inhumanity of European border politics? Sadly not. Scholz’s detractors have no problem hardening their own borders. Prime minister Donald Tusk called the controls at Poland’s Western border “unacceptable.” On the other side of the country, Polish border guards are now allowed to use live ammunition in their violent response to Belarus’s weaponization of Middle Eastern refugees.
Gerhard Karner, the Austrian interior minister, resolutely stated that his country would not receive any of the migrants that Germany refuses. But Karner ignores Austria’s usage of the same EU mechanism as Germany to impose controls on Schengen borders with Slovakia and the Czech Republic, as well as his own sustained opposition to Romania and Bulgaria’s entry into Schengen due to their insecure borders. Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis also accused Germany of attracting too many migrants because of its welfare policies and declared that the new measures “damage the fundamental achievements of the EU.” The Greek coastguard killing dozens of migrants, however, does not seem to damage any EU achievements.
This is not, to be clear, a matter of hypocrisy or dissonance. Germany’s border controls are indeed widening the cracks within the European project. But they are, at the same time, showing that this project is fundamentally constructed on the instrumentalization, exploitation, and death of migrants. Debates about EU migration policy abound in mentions of “solidarity,” a solidarity that Germany is supposedly betraying. But who is the subject of this solidarity? It is not the migrants who spend years in camps, who are deported to countries where their lives are in danger, who drown in the Mediterranean. It is European nation states.
After all, no EU external borders are controlled by Germany. The new checks on Schengen borders have triggered a new round of discussions about non-European immigration because they affect, as the Austrian response shows, the distribution of refugees and asylum seekers within the EU. In European debates and policies, the matter of who takes in refugees, how many, who pays and who can refuse, are framed as debates about the peaceful and fair cooperation of member states. They are debates about the solidarity that EU government have the duty to show to other members by ensuring that all of them equitably share the burden of welcoming and integrating migrants.
Many, of course, (attempt to) exclude themselves from such mechanisms – and the new EU regulations approved earlier this year will impose a system of “mandatory solidarity.” Germany’s imposing of border controls have been seen as one of the EU’s richest, most powerful countries attempting to shirk its own responsibility for taking in migrants. By seeking to reject asylum seekers at the border and refusing to process them, Germany’s government washes its hands of the people whom, according to critics from the AfD to Mitsotakis, it has been attracting through its lax and generous policies.
Even for some supposedly left commentators, this is a lack of solidarity not towards migrants, but towards other EU member states. Germany refuses to fairly coordinate its policies with other member states and sets a precedent that could lead to a domino effect of closed borders and to the unravelling of EU migration policies. This scenario would obviously hurt people on the move. But calling on Germany to play nice at European politics and lean into the new migration regulations is not a solution. The new CEAS pact’s major shortcomings have been widely criticized, and they will cause only more deaths and detentions.
Within these debates, whose terms are set by murderous EU regulation, solidarity is oriented towards other member states and towards EU citizens. Asylum seekers and refugees appear only as objects, as numbers and bodies, as tools for power plays and political games. Criticism of Germany’s new measures is necessary, but as long as the critique remains within this framework, it is fundamentally limited. It continues presenting migrants as a burden, as an amorphous threat and competitor to Europeans citizens, whose damaging effects need to be minimized through the right combination of policies and politicking.
A radical reorientation of solidarity is needed, one that is based on a very basic concept: migrants, regardless of legal status, of citizenship, or of the reason why they are on the move, are people, and the discourse about migration should be about their needs and wellbeing. True solidarity is not the one that Scholz shows, or refuses to show, to Greece or Poland. True solidarity is practiced by movements and groups who protect and welcome refugees, and who have to fight against EU laws and institutions to ensure a minimal degree of justice.
