A Numbers Story

It's a statistic that Focus (the German news magazine) brought up today, for 2018, that is curious in nature.

For 2018, out of the 16 German states....57,000-odd deportations were planned out and attempted.  Curiously, 30,921 attempts failed.  So slightly less than half of the deportations actually occurred.  Added to the data is the fact that 7,000 of these attempts that failed....occurred on the actual day that the cops were attempting to put the person on the flight to leave.

Cops will explain this 7,000 number with the chief reasons: (1) deportee missing, (2) illness, or (3) their exit paper/passport cannot be located. 

The public view of these matters?  Five years ago, deportations were a rare thing and rarely if ever brought up in the news media.  In the Bundestag circles, no one worried about the topic, or public reaction....it simply wasn't a problem.  The growing general public view is that migration, immigration, asylum, and deportation are all programs with dismal aspects.  Germans would like to hold someone (a political party, a leader, etc) responsible and just yank on their chain to resolve this.  But you can't really find the person or party to 'fire'.

There is this talk of a draft law being passed around (referred to as the "orderly return law").  In four to six weeks....it's supposed to be produced and have the stamp of the CDU and SPD parties on it...meaning the coalition would vote it through.  The commentary about the unknown law is that deportee nominees would be vetted.  Those truly on the bad-boy list (crimes, assaults, threats, etc) would be put into a detention program and held until their deportation can be achieved (whether one day or a thousand days).  My humble guess is that this will be immediately challenged in court, and reach the EU court level (way down the line in two years). 

As 2018 closed out, the German government reported to the public that roughly 235k failed visa applicants existed in Germany, and needed to be deported.  Roughly a third of them can't leave....primarily because they have no passport, or 'entry-papers' for their former country. 

Program-wise, Germans are often obsessed with things running in a timely and efficient manner. If sixty-six trains are supposed to leave daily from such-and-such railway station...their expectation is that sixty-six will leave.  If you come up and note on a 365-day schedule that two trains typically failed in 100-plus days to run, it begs questions and you usually have to go and appoint a 'truth-committee' to determine who or what is causing those two scheduled trains never to run. 

Well, in this deportation matter, no one really wants a 'truth-commission' to walk into this problem because it'll turn into a pro-asylum versus anti-asylum battle, and the public will identify the pro-asylum German crowd as part of the problem.

There's a history element to this issue as well.....which no one really wants to put on the table and discuss.  Prior to 2013, it was the 'norm' for immigration and asylum to be handled in an embassy of Germany....not the actual homeland of Germany.   If you felt that you needed a visa or wanted to be resettled into Germany....you went into a German embassy, presented your ID (or passport), filled out a dozen pages of forms, and applied.  The embassy would verify your ID, and ship the papers off to BamF (the agency over such matters), and in six to eight weeks....return the application either stamped approved or disapproved.  With that, the embassy would create a visa, and you'd board a flight to leave for Frankfurt.  That was the norm from the 1950s, until 2013.  You didn't worry much about deportation because the individual had a complete review, an ID was presented, and the case was settled.  Because of the 'open-door' situation, with asylum folks just walking across the border, there's no way to return to the old method. 

Politically hurting both the CDU and SPD.....long-term?  That's the possibility.  It's like a rodeo situation, where both parties are holding on and just hope that the horse eventually tires out.  But the public patience is reaching a level where both parties are openly challenged.