From the perspective of Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, border controls are necessary in Germany. Now there are new numbers.
In the first month after controls began at the German land borders in the west and north, 1,000 people were turned back there. In total, the federal police detected around 1,700 unauthorized entries there from September 16th to October 20th and discovered around 30 smugglers, as the Federal Ministry of the Interior announced upon request. The “Rheinische Post” had previously reported on it.
Border controls are not actually planned in the Schengen area. Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) justified the order of stationary controls at all land borders from mid-September on the grounds of irregular migration and protection against Islamist terrorists and cross-border crime. France, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg are affected by the expansion. Such controls have been in place at the borders with Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland since mid-October last year, and they were introduced at the German-Austrian land border in autumn 2015.
On average, significantly more people are intercepted by the police at the land borders in the south and east. According to the Interior Ministry, there were around 33,000 rejections and around 57,000 unauthorized entries from mid-October 2023 to October 20, 2024. In addition, according to information, around 1,400 smugglers have been busted there since then. The federal police want to publish a balance sheet on the overall figures and the effect of the border controls on November 1st.
Video | Faeser orders controls at all German borders
The police speak of unauthorized entry if a foreigner wants to cross the border without a valid residence permit. Rejections are particularly possible if someone does not express a request for asylum or if the person concerned is temporarily banned from re-entering the country. This is the case, for example, if someone has previously been deported or for people who come from so-called safe countries of origin if their asylum application has already been rejected as “obviously unfounded”.
Stationary border controls are a prerequisite for rejections, as this measure is only possible directly at the border. Pushbacks of asylum seekers for whose procedure another EU country is responsible are also possible in areas close to the border, but here the requirements and effort are significantly more extensive.
Union politicians recently called for a national emergency to be declared so that those seeking protection without an entry ban could be turned back at the borders. Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) rejects this and, among other things, points to EU legal concerns. She has announced that she will discuss accelerated procedures with the federal states that have a land border in order to check, close to the border, whether someone should actually go through their asylum procedure in another state of the European Union according to the so-called Dublin rules.
According to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, a Dublin procedure at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bamf) takes an average of 4.5 months. A request for takeover is made to the state responsible for the respective asylum procedure. If there is approval from there, the immigration authorities can organize the deportation within a certain period of time – usually six months – with the support of the Federal Police. If the deadline passes without a return transfer, responsibility for the asylum procedure passes to Germany.
According to the Bamf, 179,212 people applied for asylum in Germany for the first time in the first nine months of this year. Compared to the same period last year, this represents a decrease of 23.3 percent. 16,172 of the initial applications submitted by the end of September 2024 concerned children born in Germany under the age of one year.