The Steinmeier Speech

For Unity Day yesterday....the German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier made a big speech over in Mainz and discussed something that most political folks try to avoid.

He got to the topic of refugees, migrants and immigrants....noting that they needs to be a distinction written down over the difference between political persecution and 'poverty migration'.

In the old days (prior to the wall coming down), West Germany had a fairly capable immigration program.  You applied in your home-country....gave a listing of reasons why you'd be a good candidate (degree, craft, skill, German language), a review would take place, and if approved....they gave you a slip of paper to allow you to fly into West Germany to resettle.  Even through the 2010 period....that standard program generally worked. After 2013, people generally have looked the other way and pretended that the door is wide open.

The odds of the new government (CDU-CSU-Greens-FDP) coming to an agreement on this?  Zero.  The Greens won't agree to this type of immigration limit.

What I suspect will happen here (Steinmeier is SPD), is that the SPD Party will go into a rebuilding mode and funnel this concept of re-writing the German Basic Law (the Constitution) to identify several different groups of people (migrants, immigrants, refugees), and lay out how each group would be handled.

For four years, they will hype this and lead the public in a vision of a new policy.  In some ways, they would recover part of the lost SPD-voters to the AfD, and maybe attract some CDU-voters as well. I won't say it's a bold plan or a permanent fix....but considering the amount of public discontent existing since 2014....it's the only realistic idea being discussed.

If in 2014....the Germans had invented a visa for Syrians/Iraqis escaping the ISIS-war, and said that monthly they could accept 30,000 coming in (actually flying them into Germany), and that the visa would have a limit of three years (to be renewed), and there would be a limit of say....750,000 in Germany....a lot of the public frustration would have been avoided.  The oddball characters from Afghanistan, Northern Africa, and Central Africa?  They would have been crossed off the path quickly.  None of this AfD business or hyped-up sensitivity would exist today.