An Essay over Expelling

This essay is about the width and depth of refugee talk in Germany....over expelling a failed applicant.

Once you enter Germany....basically by walking or hiking in....you just walk up to some cop....announce yourself....and he takes you to some station in the state where they pull out some papers, and get you signed up for asylum, immigration, or refugee status.  They usually wanted to see a passport, which sometimes got produced, and sometimes....there was no passport.

Forty years ago, Germans wouldn't have accepted that 'no-passport' story and your odds of getting past the airport or border would have been marginal.  Today, generally no problem.

So they move you to such-and-such refugee center.  Each state has to run an operation and there's some guy in Nuremberg who is doing the tally and making sure that there is fair distribution to the sixteen states. Don't ask about the distribution formula....because it gets to being fairly complicated (something like rocket science but ten times more difficult).

You arrive with your family and find that the camp/center....is better than what you got on the road but it's not exactly some hotel operation like your cousin suggested from two years ago.  There's a heated building, plenty of food, and some basic comforts.   More paperwork is accomplished and you are told that you will be considered for a full-up visa.  They caution you....it won't come back in six weeks, which was the norm back in 2005.  They hint in a nice way....it might be six to nine months.

The longer you stay....the more likely you think you will be approved.  It's a silly idea, but that's generally how it works.  Most people have NO plan B.  They've put everything into this hike to Germany.

Liars?  That's part of the problem.  You will find X number of people bought an Iraqi or Syrian passport (fake) and pretend to be from that region and talk of the threat of ISIS upon their family.  Later, they get discovered to being Moroccan or Libyan, and so the potential of getting approved goes from ninety-percent chance down to one-percent chance.....rather quickly.  Germans don't appreciate liars that much.

As weeks and months go by....you see people who pass the visa application and people who fail.  What you tend to notice is that some people in the background....the volunteers at the site....the doctors....the legal representation folks....they all seem to be wanting to "help" you and quickly mount appeals or create stalling tactics.

A doctor will discover some health problem, or some lawyer will find an error in your paperwork.  So you get another 90 days here or maybe even six more months.

These people think they are doing a great positive thing....by defeating the mechanism which they believe is unfairly built and will not give people a fair chance to live in Germany.  The fact that the law created this method and they are helping to violate the law....doesn't usually come up in their thinking process.

The government doesn't talk about the kicking-out process very much.  I guess they aren't happy about the public stigma attached to the process.   States are the ones stuck with the duty....not the federal folks (they only survey the application and pass/fail the applicants).

If this were me....I'd bring the 10 folks failing the application today into a hall and just say your stay is over with, and you will be escorted to your room or cubicle to pick up your personal belonging and then loaded onto a truck to some special center built only for failed applicants.  No volunteers allowed.  You bring in five retired German bureaucrats (put them up at a local hotel and pay them 4,000 Euro for their services) each month to review the failed packages and give it a once over.  Then ship the guy back to his homeland.  If they refuse him....just keep at the special center (fenced in completely) as long as it takes to find him another country to accept him.

This talk by the CDU interior minister?  He wants to quicken the pace and just get these people out, but there's no agreement with the coalition partner (the SPD Party).  So, I doubt if anything will really occur.....unless you dump half the folks in the Bundestag via some election.

As for German public?  I'm guessing they will eventually get to the point of asking what exactly are they paying from the tax revenue pot....for failed applicants and their basic necessities.  The Berlin folks will just grin and say they don't really know.....but you can probably do the numbers and come to twenty-odd million Euro a month minimum.  That won't come across as pocket-change to the typical tax-payer.

Fixing any of this?  Impossible.  Faking the public enough to think that they might be fixing things?  Well....that's about all Germans can hope for.