Saxony's Minister of the Interior Calls for Tighter Asylum Laws

Saxony’s Interior Minister Armin Schuster is calling for stricter asylum laws. “The reception capacity in cities and municipalities must be the benchmark for the extent to which Germany grants asylum in the future,” states a four-point plan. In general, the CDU politician wants a quota-based system to replace the individual right to asylum in the future. The Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland (RND) was the first to report on the plan, which is also available to the German Press Agency.

To facilitate the deportation of criminals, Schuster is pushing for an amendment to the European Convention on Human Rights. In the future, the country’s security interests must be given greater weight than the interest of criminals in remaining in the country, the paper states. It also calls for rejected asylum seekers to be placed in coercive detention in the future to enforce their departure. To this end, immigration law must allow for “detention to enforce departure.”

“To now fully implement the migration turnaround, we must ensure that individuals required to leave the country—and first and foremost those who have committed crimes and those who do not integrate—actually depart,” Schuster explains. 

Last year, the president of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), Hans-Eckhard Sommer, had already proposed replacing individual asylum reviews with humanitarian admissions based on quotas. In addition to humanitarian considerations, the labor market’s capacity for integration could also play a role here. He emphasized that this was his “personal assessment” and that he was not speaking as BAMF president. At the time, Schuster welcomed the proposal as a “very constructive contribution to the debate” and argued that with a humanitarian quota system, Germany could introduce a “flexible cap.”