Munich, 13 February: a car ploughs into a group of people in the centre of the South German city, leaving dozens wounded and two dead. The attacker is a 24-year-old Afghan national with a residence permit; the public prosecutor says the motive for the attack is religious. The incident took place shortly before the German federal elections and is likely to inflame polarisation around the main campaign issue – German asylum policy.
Losing control
Tobias Hillenbrand, German by birth, economist and political scientist, is concerned. His doctoral thesis, which he hopes to complete this year, is about the attitude of Germans towards immigration. In an interview that took place shortly before 13 February, he said that he sees a double and inter-related crisis: support for asylum seekers is decreasing and, partly because of that, the polarisation around the issue is peaking, which is creating room for extremist parties. “We saw that in recent elections in the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria, and to a certain degree recently, in the United States.” And in Germany, apparently. “When you show people profiles and ask them who should be allowed in, someone who is fleeing a war zone or someone who is coming to work, most people choose the refugee. My hypothesis is that most people are only against immigration because they associate it strongly with illegal immigration.” That gives people a sense that their country is losing control over its borders, “and a loss of control leads to fear”.
Hillenbrand’s most important question is “whether you can organise a migration system in such a way that it doesn’t lead to polarisation and the rise of extremist parties”. In his search for an answer, he polled how Germans would feel about a reform of asylum policy: reducing illegal immigration by sending those migrants to countries outside the EU which have agreed to allow them to request asylum there, like the British tried to do with Rwanda. And on the other hand, admitting more refugees through legal routes – something that is already happening on a small scale: in 2024, Germany announced that it would comply with a request from UNHCR to admit 6500 refugee from camps in the Middle-East and Africa.
No fault lines
How realistic is that first scenario? In 2022, the British government agreed a similar deal with Rwanda: henceforth, that country would receive asylum seekers who had reached British shores. In exchange, Rwanda would be given financial aid and asylum seekers in Rwandan camps would be allowed to travel to the UK legally. The deal was always controversial, and the new British government cancelled it last year. True, says Hillenbrand, “but the legal concerns in that deal were mostly concerned with the situation in Rwanda and the conditions people who were sent there were faced with, not the idea itself”.
So what was the result of the representative sample of 2200 German citizens, which forms the third chapter of Hillenbrand’s doctoral thesis? “That an almost 60 per cent majority of people surveyed is in favour of such a reform.” Variables such as education levels, age, and whether people lived in the west or the east (where AfD is the largest party in one of the states), make no difference. Equally irrelevant is political preference: followers of almost all the major German parties show more support than resistance to the proposal. Even among AfD voters, where a large minority (47 per cent) would accept such a reform. “The traditional fault lines in society aren’t fault lines on this issue,” says Hillenbrand. “Most people are actually quite prepared to take in refugees, they’re mostly unhappy with the way it is currently organised. If it happens in an orderly manner, so that you can anticipate it, they find they can live with it.”
He says politicians could talk about admitting more refugees “without fear of being punished by voters”. The CDU certainly could, says Hillenbrand – their manifesto even says they want to have more regularised refugee migration, but because they are scared of losing voters, they rarely talk about it. “But the idea that you can attract more voters by saying more and more extreme things is just not true. People might not want the more extreme solution, just a different one. Their ideas about migration aren’t as simplistic as the media sometimes likes to portray them.”
Balance
It must be said that Hillenbrand collected his data before ‘Munich’ and the incident in Aschaffenburg, where another Afghan asylum seeker stabbed two people to death, one of them a toddler. Although he doesn’t think that opinions will have changed much. “Because, unfortunately, these incidents aren’t isolated: there were similar incidents in Magdeburg, Solingen and Mannheim. What’s new about the idea is that it’s not a classic pro- or anti-immigration story, but about finding a balance.”