A total of 4,600 migrants returned to Germany this year, despite being banned from re-entering the country—this is according to Die Welt, which published data by the Central Register of Foreign Nationals.
According to the report, a total of 4,614 people deported asylum seekers re-entered Germany in the first nine months of this year, despite an existing entry ban. In the same period, 14,718 migrants were deported.
Most of those who re-entered the country were Afghan nationals (443), followed by Moldovans (431), Syrians (385), Serbians (304), Macedonians (277), Algerians (266), Turks (255), Georgians (221), Albanians (220), and Bosnians (173).
“The probability that people will re-offend when they re-enter the country is very high. They’ve actually committed a crime by re-entering the country, and therefore should have been imprisoned,” the chairman of the German Police Trade Union, Rainer Wendt told Die Welt.
According to Rainer Wendt, the duration of the re-entry ban should be increased from the current maximum of five years to at least ten years. Entry and residence bans are deleted from the central register at the end of a blocking period, which is usually five years. This means that the authorities cannot always trace whether a migrant has returned illegally or not.
The newly released data highlights the lack of effective border controls, as well as the difficulties of deporting migrants who have no right to stay in the country.
While around 9,500 people were deported in the first half of this year, more than 14,000 deportations failed, with the interior ministry citing cancelled flights, the absence or illness of the deportee, or other “organisational reasons.”
However, the ministry data revealed that as of June 30th, 226,882 people in Germany were obliged to leave the country, as they were not entitled to asylum.
Migration has become a hot topic this year after a series of knife attacks and terrorist attacks committed by migrants, many of whom turned out to be failed asylum seekers who for one reason or another were allowed to stay in the country.
German voters are angry about the left-liberal government’s inability to tackle illegal immigration and have voted in great numbers for the anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in recent regional elections.
With snap elections coming up in February, the opposition centre-right CDU/CSU alliance—which is leading opinion polls—has vowed to get tough on immigration and wants to see migrants who are not eligible for asylum in Germany turned back at the border.
Whether they actually fulfil these promises remains to be seen since they will likely have to enter into a coalition with at least one other party, which will probably be the currently governing pro-migration Social Democrats or the Greens. The CDU/CSU alliance was responsible for opening Germany’s border to hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants at the beginning of the European migration crisis in 2015, so critics will wonder whether their rhetoric on migration is at all credible.