Tuesday, January 3, 2017

The Holding Center Idea

The German Interior Minister (de Maiziere) did a Q and A session with a German newspaper.  There's one comment that just stuck out there.  He wants to push the idea of several centers being designed and operated....for failed asylum applicants.

The basis of this idea is that currently....you get a letter from the BaMF folks (the agency that runs immigration in Germany), and it notes that after four or six, or maybe even ten months....they'd determined that you passed the requirements, or you failed the requirements.  Logic for failures?  Criminal background discovered, fake ID situation, you were from a safe country, etc.  

Most people....doesn't matter if they are German, Brit, or American....think that all applicants pass and get a visa.  That's simply not the case. There's been numerous articles over the past six months noting roughly 400,000 to 500,000 failed applicants still in Germany and either refusing to go, or forcing the court system to review each individual case and it's paperwork.  To be honest, I doubt if the court system was ever designed to function like this (on a massive scale of immigration review).  

The sixteen states are stuck with the duty of removing or transporting the failed applicants out.  Again, you would think it'd be a federal duty but that's how the whole constructed mess has functioned without real leadership out of Berlin.

So de Maiziere is suggesting these 'centers" would be put into operation.  My guess is that letters would be brought to each individual by a courier (likely four to six policemen) and they would present the failed application letter and then pick the individual or family up....with their belongings, and transport them to some regional holding-center.

If they wanted to file some appeal, they'd probably do so from the center.  Course, you could sit there and imagine the construction or design of the center.....it's more of a closed-in or no-exit type of facility (one step down from a jail).  Once you enter into this appeal process....you could be sitting there for another six months.  My humble guess is that you'd get awful frustrated with the system, and basically ask to leave....making this all a very simple process.

Inhuman?  Well.....the accusation will be made.  

If you went to all of these migrants and immigrants....months before they started this journey to leave their homeland and laid out the whole thing, then noted that because you are from such-and-such country....your odds of an accepted application was 12-percent, or 32-percent.....then it might make the individual think more about the whole trek to Germany.  In the case of Syrians or Iraqis....with the ISIS threat, their applications are more likely to pass (some article in early 2016 suggested that Syrians had like a 90-percent pass-rate).  

The odds of a holding center idea being adapted?  With the current CDU-SPD government, I have my doubts.  Both the Greens and Linke Party would be against the idea, with some SPD folks frustrated at how this makes the appearance of a jail more than anything else.

The thing is that if you appear in front of the German people and note that out of every one hundred applications for asylum.....that only sixty percent will pass, it will beg questions.  Of the forty who fail....why?  False passports and IDs part of the problem?  Yeah, one could suggest that as one of the top ten reasons. But this is a long and stretched-out process.  

Before this 2012 to now period started up....it was rare that people just showed up in Germany and started the paperwork within the country.  The normal process was that you went to some German embassy in your homeland, and handed over an application and waited two or three months....with your paperwork approved or dismissed.  You weren't a burden to Germany and you didn't turn this into some massive appeal process.  

This holding center idea will sit there and brew.  Zero chance of passing in 2017, and it'll just lay there waiting for the public to reach some boiling point where it's a last-ditch chance for some gov't to pass the legislation in order to show "concern". 

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