The German Social Democratic party (SPD) has published its working paper on immigration. It calls for half a million more migrants every year, no deportation of illegal immigrants unless they are extremely violent, voting rights for foreigners, automatic citizenship after 25 years, and a new ministry for immigration and integration.
You would think the left-wing party was in no position to make demands. After all, the SPD led the coalition government which lost the last election, when it failed to be one of the top two parties for the first time since the 19th century. But the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, which won the most votes in the election, has ruled out dealing with Alternative for Germany (AfD), which came second. That has left them with only one potential coalition partner to form a government: the SPD.
So the CDU is negotiating with the very people who led Germany to disaster after disaster over the last few years. The people who oversaw a new welfare system in which nearly half of the beneficiaries are foreigners, collapsing infrastructure, high energy prices and interest rates so high they’ve helped make it impossible to build the houses needed for a record number of immigrants.
Even worse, the CDU wants to loosen the debt brake – which prevents the state spending too much – in order to supposedly rearm Germany. That might be fine, but Friedrich Merz, the CDU leader and likely next Chancellor, knows that in the new parliament his proposals will be voted down by the hard-right AfD and hard-left Die Linke. Therefore he’s recalled the outgoing Parliament to pass his measures with the help of the SDP and Greens, who both lost large amounts of votes and will be much less powerful in the new Parliament.
That means these left-wing parties have the chance to pressure Merz into doing what they want in order to get those proposals passed before the old Parliament ends. Merz has already made concessions to the Greens by promising to spend €50 billion on the green energy transition. When that wasn’t enough, he even asked the Greens publicly in parliament: What more do you want? Despite that offer to bung them plenty of funding, the Greens have so far refused to cooperate, leaving him short of the two-thirds majority needed.
The elephant in the room is immigration. The CDU was tarnished by Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to open the borders to over a million asylum seekers. In the years since, the asylum seekers that were supposed to provide the doctors and engineers of the future have instead been more likely to appear in the crime pages of the newspapers or the welfare offices of the state. When Friedrich Merz became leader of the CDU in 2022, he was supposed to break with that past. He had been critical of Merkel and the CDU has since called for more restrictions on immigration, including declaring a border emergency.
That was enough to win back wavering voters and put the CDU first in the election. Yet with less than 30 per cent of the vote, the CDU needs coalition partners and has therefore turned to the SPD, with their extremist plans on immigration.
If the SPD do get their way, it will be a disaster. EU workers are already able to come and work in Germany. And there is unlikely to be much immigration from North America and East Asia, which are rich enough as it is. So to find 500,000 new immigrants every year, Germany will likely have to rely heavily on people from Africa and South East Asia. That will be justified on the basis that these immigrants are highly skilled but example after example has shown how hollow that claim is. In 2021 Britain threw open its border with its new points based immigration system. The result of this so-called ‘Boriswave’? Flatlining GDP and productivity. Canada and Australia, which had similar immigration waves around the same time, have also seen housing costs soar while their economies remain moribund.
The reason why can be found in a 2023 Dutch study called Borderless Welfare State, whose lead author Jan van de Beek is now publishing a book called Migration Magnet. The Netherlands has excellent data, which allows for the tracking of the costs and benefits of immigrants by their nation of origin. What they found was that immigrant workers on average contribute around €125,000 more than they cost over their lifetimes. However, when you dig into the details, it turns out that this is driven by workers from places like Japan and North America. They contribute €625,000 over their lifetimes. Workers from Africa ended up costing the Dutch taxpayer money, not least because of the effects of family reunification.
Should the CDU give into the SPD on immigration they will unleash a ‘Merzwave’, which will not only destroy their reputation on immigration again but also impose a mass fiscal cost at a time when the German economy is in a tricky position. The ‘Boriswave’ helped sink the last Conservative government. That has created the space for Reform to emerge as a genuine challenger to the Conservatives on the right. The ‘Merzwave’ has the potential to do the same in Germany, with the AfD left as the only choice for those who want to regain control of Germany’s borders. Merz’s deal may allow him to form a coalition. But it could hurt his party for decades to come.
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