New blog: Reforms welcome?! This is where Germans agree on refugee and asylum migration
On International Day of Human Fraternity, Tobias Hillenbrand and Melissa Siegel explore whether refugee policy can unite rather than divide in Germany.
The International Day of Human Fraternity offers a valuable opportunity to reflect on what unites, rather than divides, societies. One of the most severe wedge issues in many countries is asylum immigration, with Germany being a prominent example as the biggest European host country. In this blog post, we discuss a policy reform idea with a surprisingly large potential to bring people together on this issue.
After a decade of historically high levels of asylum immigration, Germany is trying to figure out what to do next. Despite initial waves of solidarity in 2015 and 2022, opposition to the admission of asylum seekers has surged, resulting in electoral successes of parties that promise to be strict on migration. Even the more progressive outgoing government has adopted a rather restrictive stance on asylum migration, driven by a public that, according to a poll from September last year, regards migration and refugees as the most important policy issue, with 77 percent demanding a “turnaround” in Germany’s refugee policies. However, it would be misguided to believe that the widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo implies a high degree of consensus on what to do with this issue. To the contrary, a recent Mercator study found that immigration is the most polarising policy issue alongside climate change (Herold et al., 2023). This puts policymakers in a particularly tough spot.
To read more, go to: https://unu.edu/merit/article/reforms-welcome-where-germans-agree-refugee-and-asylum-migration