Germany’s Christian Democrats (the CDU party) have been toughening their stance on migration in the run-up to national elections in February, including calls for the deportation of certain migrants.
Preparing for its meeting in Seeon, Upper Bavaria, from January 6 to January 8, the party outlined its course for the election campaign, apparently responding to pressure from a surging right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The Christian Social Union (CSU), the autonomous Bavarian wing of the CDU, outlined in a paper to be presented at the meeting how it wanted to handle a host of issues regarding immigration, newspaper Die Welt reported.
It included deportations, rejections and criminalising the misuse of the payment card for asylum seekers.
According to the CSU, people with a residence permit in Germany should gain employment. If not, they should lose their right to stay.
In addition, any who committed multiple offences should leave Germany.
Those who could not leave the country or be deported “must be able to be taken into indefinite detention pending deportation”.
“From this, you can leave for your home country at any time, but you can no longer return to freedom in Germany”, the paper stated.
In the paper, the CDU proposed a so-called “third country regulation”, akin to Italy’s deals with Albania and Tunisia.
“We want to create the conditions for asylum procedures and the granting of protection to take place outside Germany,” it stated.
The party also said it wanted to abolish “subsidiary protection”, which applies to those seeking asylum who do not qualify as refugees.
“It is not possible to explain why such a protection status is needed. In reality, it often leads to people staying in the country without a real need for protection,” the paper said.
The CDU also stated its desire to suspend family reunification for beneficiaries of subsidiary protection.
The CSU said it believed that what it called the misuse of appeals and institutional mechanisms by asylum seekers should also be curtailed.
“We will limit the lengthy and sometimes abusive court proceedings to review asylum decisions to the constitutional minimum of one authority,” it said in the paper.
People without entitlement to protection should be rejected at the federal border, the CSU further demanded, adding: “Anyone entering from an EU member state or another safe third country is no longer threatened.”
Another issue, that of payment cards for asylum seekers, should also be ended, it said.
With the payment card, refugees in Germany receive up to €563 per month. The goal of the card was to prevent refugees from sending money to their home country or smugglers and instead spend it in German stores.
But activists are said to have encouraged card-holders to buy vouchers on websites such as Amazon, which could then be exchanged for cash elsewhere.
“We will therefore resolutely prevent a left-wing circumvention industry from forming and refugees from buying vouchers with the payment card in order to exchange them for cash that can be transferred to their home countries in so-called exchange platforms, for example in district offices of the Greens,” the paper stated.
Chairman of the CSU Parliamentary Group in the German Bundestag, Alexander Dobrindt, recently told Bild newspaper: “First the Greens blocked the payment card, then a left-wing bypass industry was founded in their environment to defraud the payment card. We will end this abuse and punish the fraud on the payment card.”
On Monday, Dobrindt and party leader Markus Söder gave a press conference on their plans.
