The western German city of Solingen had been famous for its many factories producing high-quality knifes and blades. Tradition meeting expert craftsmanship for more than 200 years, earning the name “City of Blades” to the beautiful city near Cologne , North Rhine-Westphalia.
As a tragic twist of fate, the city made it to the world headlines with a fatal knife attack.
“We are limiting irregular migration to Germany. Too many people are coming,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said only a couple of months ago. Tension had been boiling below the surface (or often, above it) for years. Since the country that took in 1.2 million refugees and asylum seekers between 2015 and 2016, started to feel the negative effects.
Berlin is not talking about a complete stop.
Most Germans don’t even want that, not in the least because they acknowledge that the country needs the workforce.
Many would be satisfied with more moderate steps, starting with the deportation of migrants who are not supposed to stay in the country and preventing the arrival of those who would not be entitled to enter at the first place.
Yet, many fear that the government is not doing enough. A recent poll has shown that 44 percent of Germans think that illegal migration is the most important political issue and that the government’s handling of the problem is insufficient.
The Solingen attack proves that they are right.
The main suspect, 26-year-old Syrian Issa al H. arrived at Germany via Bulgaria in 2022, hence he should have been sent back there, to have his request processed there. Had his asylum request been denied, he should have been held in detention (pending his deportation).
When he wasn’t found in his home in Paderborn in 2023, authorities determined that “he had vanished”. Given the sheer number of (illegal) migrants, no police force has the capacity to track them down one by one. Issa al H. was probably aware of his chances.
The first warning sign of his malicious intent should have been that he “reappeared” months later, applying for asylum, knowing that by that time he couldn’t be sent back to Bulgaria. Yet, instead of getting deported to Syria, he was put in the refugee home in Solingen, where he eventually received subsidiary protection (in spite of his asylum claim having been denied).
As the city was celebrating its 650 anniversary, Issa al H. took a knife and killed three people, injuring eight more.
The brutal attack in Solingen wasn’t the first in Islamist terror-attacks on German lands, as it has followed a deadly knife attack against a police officer in June. The attacker was an Afghan man, who arrived in Germany in 2014. And that attack also fit into a longer string of violent acts committed by migrants, going back to the infamous 2015 New Year’s Eve mass assaults in Cologne and the 2016 Berlin Christmas Market truck attack.
Back in June this year, barely days before the European elections, Scholz declared that “such criminals should be deported, even if they come from Syria or Afghanistan”. German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser admitted that “we’re pushing the boundaries of our capacity for integration”.
Despite this, the message in mainstream media focused mostly on “the far-right seizing on the crime perpetrated by Afghan migrant to stoke fear”.
And again, in the wake of the latest attack in Solingen, Chancellor Scholz defended his government’s migration policy. Even if he pledged that they would do “everything we can to ensure that those who cannot and should not stay here in Germany are repatriated and deported”, adding that deportations would be sped up, if necessary. He also promised to tighten weapons regulations, especially “the use of knives”.
And again, it is the “far-right” that is accused by media of “eying boost at the ballot”, as it was reported that the AfD demanded a five-year asylum moratorium.
According to available statistical data, as of December 2023, 242,600 people were waiting for deportation in Germany. Yet, in the first three months of 2024 only 4,791 people were deported. Many of the planned relocations did not take place, mostly because the rejected asylum seeker vanished in the country or because their country of origin refused to take them back. (Doing the math, it would take more than two years just to clear the backlog, let alone process new deportations.)
The “Solingen Summit” between Scholz and Friedrich Merz (CDU) on August 27, didn’t bring a breakthrough, despite Merz calling for a “turning point” (another “Zeitenwende”) for Germany’s previously “naïve” migration policy, starting with re-establishing border controls on all of the country’s borders.
Merz also suggested to Scholz that Berlin rejected asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan, and immediately sent back rejected migrants. Among his suggestions was that any refuges that travel from Germany to their home country lose their German residence status.
The latter is a grim reminder of the realities of irregular migration and the inability of German authorities to handle the numbers or fight the loopholes in the regulations.
A report published by RTL on August 16, 2024, described in great detail, how Afghan asylum seekers and refugees are making unauthorized trips back home despite having claimed their lives were at risk there. Making use of “double entry” visas they travel back and forth via Iran – and taking advantage of the lack of adequate staff of German Federal Police at airports, they can break the rules without risking losing their asylum seeker status. And they are well aware of that, as one person in the report noted mockingly, “the Germans never notice anything”.
Considering this, the traffic-light coalition might have a hard time explaining to German citizens that Afghan asylum seekers couldn’t be sent back home, because “they risked torture, death or inhumane treatment in their home country”.
According to the reports released to the press, Chancellor Scholz refused to cooperate with the CDU on the issue of migration, hence the “Solingen Summit” ended with no significant progress. Chancellor Scholz himself called for “calm”, reminding Germans that “we are all one country that stands together”. A government spokesperson later explained that the government thought that ignoring asylum rules “would violate German constitutional rules”, also claiming that asylum applications are already sinking.
Though Chancellor Scholz has vowed to solve the problem without fundamentally changing its migration policy, it is unclear how exactly he (or the government) plans to achieve that, especially in light of the obvious failures and gaps in the German system. Tightening the rules on carrying knives in public probably won’t change much, either, as Merz pointed out, “it’s not the knives that are the problem, but the people who walk around with them”.
In the meantime, German voters fearing the loss of their lives, both in the very physical sense, but also figuratively, the loss of the “German-way” of living in a safe, crime-free environment, might continue to search for alternative political representation. In Saxony, for example, voters tend to trust the CDU and the AfD to solve this issue. In Thuringia, the AfD is thought to be the most effective.
