The first came on August 25, 2015, when Merkel chose to allow Syrian refugees who had already registered elsewhere in the European Union to enter Germany and register there, temporarily suspending an EU law that requires asylum seekers to be returned to the first country they entered.
The following Friday, September 4, Merkel relaxed controls on the border with Austria, allowing tens of thousands of refugees stranded in Hungary to enter Germany.
In reality, experts say, the “open door” was something of a myth — and is far from true today.
“It wasn’t that Merkel opened the borders,” said Christoph Nguyen, political scientist at Free University Berlin. “She just maintained the existing law of freedom of movement within Europe. It wasn’t so much an opening as a ‘not closing.'”
Without question, the events of 2015 mark a milestone in Germany’s history. Rarely had a European country faced such a rapid influx of people in peacetime.
But for those seeking asylum in Germany in 2018, the door is far from open. And for many of those already inside, life is getting harder.
“The restrictions (on entry) are rising from month to month,” Philipp Pruy, immigration lawyer at BC Legal in Regensburg, Germany, told CNN. “It’s extremely hard to immigrate to Germany. It’s even harder if you’re a refugee.”
‘Never an open door’
On September 13, 2015, just nine days after refugees began crossing the Austrian border into Germany in their tens of thousands, Merkel’s government reintroduced border controls in response to reports that some regions were not coping with the rapid arrival of so many newcomers.
Train traffic from Austria was temporarily halted and German police began patrolling road crossing points.
As far as an “open door” ever existed for refugees seeking to enter Germany, it had begun to close after less than two weeks.
Why then the continued talk of a migration crisis in Germany? The reasons are two-fold, according to Nguyen, political scientist in Berlin: the challenge of integrating the new, and often very visible, refugee communities and the sudden growth of the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the wake of summer 2015.
The AfD “became a movement with legs when the refugee situation amplified,” Nguyen said. Now other parties are responding — and trying to win back votes — by becoming tougher on immigration, he explains, even though the underlying problem (the number of refugees arriving) “is not present anymore.”
Families kept apart
Many of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians now living in Germany are therefore separated from their wives, husbands or children.
“These are deterrence measures,” said Kopp, referring to the policy changes in early 2016. “And it’s really not good for integration. People can’t move forward if their family is still living in limbo. People lose faith.”
Deportations on the rise
BC Legal’s Pruy is extremely critical of the deportations. “You cannot deport people to a crisis region,” he said. “We are a rich country, we are a civilized country and we cannot allow people to be deported to a country where there is a civil war… Thousands of people are dying every year.”
In a statement to CNN, the German Foreign Office said that “the situation in Afghanistan continues to be regionally diverse and volatile” and that “there is always a case-by-case consideration by the competent authorities” regarding the situation of individuals eligible for deportation.
‘Drastic tightening of asylum law’
For those who are still in the asylum process, Merkel and her government have introduced a raft of restrictive measures since September 2015 that Pruy describes as “a drastic tightening of the asylum law.”
The new laws have also led to quicker decision-making on asylum claims, but that doesn’t mean greater accuracy or efficiency, Pruy said.
And Kopp is concerned that the effort to speed up deportations is leaving many people without the time to appeal and potentially have their right to protection acknowledged. “It’s a matter of life and death for them,” he said.
‘The refugee chancellor doesn’t exist’
While Merkel has never publicly said she regrets her actions in late summer 2015, she has repeatedly pledged to drastically reduce the number of refugees arriving in Germany, replacing her infamous refrain of those weeks — “we can do it” — with another: “The events of 2015 must not be repeated.”
In apparent pursuit of that goal, she helped strike a controversial deal between the EU and Turkey designed to stop arrivals in Greece and supports a plan to seek similar deals with African countries to stem migration flows even earlier.
“The number of asylum seekers in Germany has gone down,” said Merkel in a speech to parliament last Thursday, ahead of the EU summit. “But we must not be satisfied with that — I want to say that emphatically.”
To Kopp, it is laughable that anyone still views Merkel and Germany as exemplars of refugee policy. “To pretend there is still a welcoming environment in Germany is wrong,” said Kopp. “The Merkel of summer 2015 — the refugee chancellor — doesn’t exist any more.”
CNN’s Nadine Schmidt contributed to this report.
Source : Nbcnewyork