Germany’s new interior minister, Alexander Dobrint of the Christian Social Union (CSU), has made quite a stir with his proposals to end family reunification and ‘turbo citizenship’, which allowed people to become citizens after as little as three years in Germany. However, as usual in Germany, under the outrage is a more prosaic reality. Only those without official refugee status will be barred from bringing family members to Germany, and it won’t even apply to those who have already come to Germany to claim asylum.
It’s a strange irony that freedom of movement across Europe could end up being curtailed because of the EU’s collective failure to tackle migration. You can only have weak internal borders if you have strong external ones
Since 2018, up to 12,000 people a year have come to Germany under family reunification. The new measures seem unlikely to reduce those numbers much. What is more, in 2024 there were 350,000 people in Germany who hadn’t yet been given full refugee status but were still eligible for family reunification.
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