Merkel flip-flops on refugees

[Beezer]

The news satire program "ZDF heute-show" has probably put it best:





THE UPPER LIMIT
(which isn't a upper limit, except for the CSU)

FOR 200,000 IMMIGRANTS A YEAR
(unless special circumstanes occur or the benchmark is changed, in which case the net immigration needs to calculated first)

WILL COME!
(unless it's rejected by the Greens... and it will be.)

Nothing drives me more mad than this conflation of migrants, immigrants, refugees etc.

But yeah, this isn't really a cap since no one will be stopped at the border. So if 2015 were to repeat itself, Germany would face the same exact challenge.

[Beezer]

200,000 a year is a lot. Why do the other parties find it so unreasonable?

Strictly speaking, any upper limit on asylum seekers is in violation of the German constitution.

(So, if they were such an upper limit, the Constitutional Court could strike it down.)

Strictly speaking granting asylum to anyone that entered Germany via Austria is in violation of the German constitution. No one seems to give a crap about it though.

[Beezer]

200,000 a year is a lot. Why do the other parties find it so unreasonable?

Strictly speaking, any upper limit on asylum seekers is in violation of the German constitution.

(So, if they were such an upper limit, the Constitutional Court could strike it down.)

Strictly speaking granting asylum to anyone that entered Germany via Austria is in violation of the German constitution. No one seems to give a crap about it though.

No. Strictly speaking, that's not a violation of the constitution.

Article 16a (2) of the Basic Law merely states that a person who enters the country from another EU member state is not entitled to the right of asylum. However, it doesn't explicitly forbid the government from granting him or her asylum anyway. It merely means that it's the government's prerogative to decide in that case.

Of course, the only way to clear that up once and for all would be a ruling by the Constitutional Court. It's curious though that despite the fact that AfD politicians may argue that the government is in in fact violation of Article 16a (2) they never bothered to file a complaint with the Constitutional Court on the matter. That's because the Court would most likely rule against them IMO, which in turns means that Merkel's opponents would lose one of their major talking points.

"Paragraph 1 may not be invoked" sounds like a pretty clear set of rules to me. What is it doing in there if the government can just blatantly disregard it (genuine question)? Now of course the constitutional court would support the government's position, as it has done on every matter in recent years so I'm not surprised by the AfD not taking this issue to Karlsruhe.

The whole debate is pointless though. Germans have resigned themselves to welcoming everyone that turns up at their border, regardless of how many safe countries they have passed on their way to the promised land. The disgusting thing is that they now want to force other European countries to do the same. Thank God there's some pushback against this though.

[Beezer]

I wouldn't call it flip-flopping. CDU and CSU had different positions and they met half way. Now they have finally a common position, as half-baked it may be. CSU wanted a definite cap of 200,000 refugees a year. CDU has now agreed to the number of 200,000 as sort of a non-binding benchmark which they seek to reach.

What it means for the coalition talks... it may actually not mean that much in the end. If the coalition talks with FDP and Greens are a success, this compromise between CDU and CSU will of course be watered down even further. Merkel certainly knows that, which is why it was easy for her to throw the CSU a bone and agree to that compromise in the first place.

The only thing which could upset this is if the CSU goes uncompomising into the talks with FDP and Greens and is unwilling to back down then. Then we're gonna have a snap election, folks.

200,000 still is too many. Maybe 50,000.

The 200,000 figure was grabbed out of thin air in the fall of 2015 when >10,000 people were turning up at the border each and every day. It's telling that aside from the AfD, no one is actually questioning the size of this cap. Apparently Germans believe that housing equivalent to the size of a major German city like Mainz can just magically appear overnight. And then they're complaining about spiraling rent costs and the inability of families to live in urban areas.