Seven-month winter deportation ban for refugees in Berlin

By Daniel Weinmann

In Berlin, the capacity for additional migrants is just as exhausted as in the rest of the Federal Republic. As recently as mid-September, Berlin’s “State Office for Immigration” had warned that there was no longer any capacity for admission in the capital. Nevertheless, the winter deportation ban for refugees, a crude relic of the red-green-red coalition that was voted out of office in the spring, will probably remain in place.

The governing mayor Kai Wegner recently had the courage to question the regulation. “We have to talk to our social democratic coalition partner about whether we can afford a winter deportation stop from October to April,” the CDU politician told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

It’s not hard to guess how the coalition partner reacted. “Anyone who thinks that the end of the winter deportation ban will ease tensions is mistaken,” Orkan Özdemir, the integration policy spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group in the House of Representatives, told “RBB.” Özdemir stressed that refraining from repatriations during the winter months was good practice in Berlin for humanitarian reasons. Families are also affected. Children in particular should not be exposed to any risk.

Integration Senator Cansel Kiziltepe blew the same horn. “Berlin is acting in a humanitarian way, which is why we rightly have a winter deportation ban,” the SPD politician stressed in the“Tagesspiegel” newspaper. Softening the winter deportation stop, he said, is part of that public argument about migration that only strengthens right-wing populism.

Precarious: Mayor Wegner’s own decision fell on his feet. “In winter, deportations are to be dispensed with if weather conditions make this a humanitarian imperative,” the coalition partners CDU and SPD had agreed under his direction at the end of April.

“The Best for Berlin,” was the paper’s telling title. The reasonableness of this regulation remains the secret of Berlin’s rulers. Is it really inhumane to send refugees back to their almost consistently warmer home countries in the sometimes freezing Berlin winter?

So now the turnaround, with which Wegner possibly wanted to profit from the change of mood among the German population. As recently as Sunday, the election results in Hesse and Bavaria showed particularly impressively that open-arms policies do not win votes.

According to the Interior Department, 17,436 people in Berlin were obliged to leave the country at the end of June this year. Of these, however, the vast majority, 15,261, have a toleration. In these cases, repatriation is not possible under current law for legal, humanitarian or personal reasons.

Thus, 2,175 persons would be without toleration and therefore obliged to leave the country. The subjunctive is deliberately chosen, because they have nothing to fear in the capital of the “best Germany that has ever existed” (Steinmeier).

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Contributions marked by name always reflect the opinion of the author, not mine. I value my readers as adults and want to offer them different points of view so they can form their own opinions.

Daniel Weinmann worked for many years as an editor for one of the best-known German media. He writes here under a pseudonym.

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