A Green member of the German Bundestag has called on the Federal Government to settle more Afghans in Ulm, his home city in Baden-Württemberg, southwest Germany.
Marcel Emmerich wrote to interior minister Alexander Dobrindt, of the Christian Social Union (CSU), saying Afghans who had worked alongside the Bundeswehr were still waiting in Pakistan for admission. He described that situation as intolerable.
The request rested on a decision taken by Ulm city council in July, according to Schwäbische Zeitung. The council told both the Baden-Württemberg state government and Berlin that the city was willing to receive Afghan families.
Emmerich also pointed to a ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court on July 22. The court found the Government could not abandon its Afghan admission programmes across the board without examining individual cases.
Judges in Karlsruhe upheld a complaint brought by an Afghan mother and her two minor sons, who remain in Pakistan. They had been told in 2021 they would be admitted under a scheme known as the human rights list.
The court said the executive enjoyed wide political discretion but was still bound by the constitutional ban on arbitrary decisions. It stopped short of granting a direct right to visas and sent the case back to the Higher Administrative Court in Berlin-Brandenburg.
The interior ministry had informed the foreign ministry in December 2025 that admission pledges covering about 640 people were invalid and had expired. The governing coalition under Chancellor Friedrich Merz agreed in 2025 to wind down voluntary admission programmes as far as possible.
Some 523 people from those programmes were still receiving German support in Pakistan on March 16, 54 of them from the human rights list, the court noted. Berlin had earlier offered cash payments to Afghans in Pakistan to persuade them not to travel.
German voters have taken a different view. A survey published by Ipsos in July found 51 per cent wanted the borders closed to further asylum seekers, against 43 per cent who backed more admissions.
The same survey found 62 per cent believed most asylum seekers came to draw on the economy or the welfare system. Only 31 per cent regarded the majority as genuine refugees.
About 19,300 Afghans have been brought to Germany through the local staff procedures, Junge Freiheit reported. The Bundeswehr said in April 2021 that roughly 300 Afghans were then working for its contingent in the country.
