For decades, migration policy in Germany has followed the same pattern of racialization and control. The consequences go far beyond the current election debate, in which the leading candidates for the highest office in the land are outdoing each other in terms of who can most effectively put migrants ‘in their proper place.’ Sabine Hess deconstructs dominant discourses on migration and shows how the racist fixation on migration as the ‘mother of all problems’ causes social harm and distracts from real social problems.
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“Migration is the mother of all problems” – with this much quoted sentence, the then Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer had a lasting impact on the discourse on migration in 2018. At the same time, the number of refugees had already fallen by 16.5 percent compared to the previous year. In the years that followed, the debate intensified: today, the only issue is ‘irregular migration.’ However, these are the same people who in 2015 were welcomed as refugees with painful experiences. This is also shown by the asylum statistics for 2024: the main countries of origin of people fleeing to Germany are still countries with ongoing wars and conflicts. Of the refugees arriving here, 62 percent are entitled to protection status and the remaining 38 percent cannot be deported for various reasons.
The use of the term irregular migration, as opposed to the term refugee movement, insinuates a negativity in the discourse, denies the legitimacy of legitimate refugee movements and thus places them outside the international legal framework and the Geneva Convention on Refugees. Flight thus becomes an ‘illegal affair,’ a migration without rights. In a sense, this is a classic example of the victim-perpetrator reversal. It is primarily restrictive migration policies – such as restrictive visa policies – that force refugees to take irregular routes.
Migration without rights
While the political discourse is now dominated by talk of “laws to combat the influx” (CDU), a look at the figures makes it clear that the dramatic narratives are not supported by the facts. About 79 percent of those who came to Germany came from a European country. The number of people applying for asylum in Germany also fell by 30.2 percent. Overall, refugees made up only about 2.6 percent of the total population in 2022. For the EU as a whole, the figure is only 1.6 percent. Historical research shows that these and other figures are only incidental in the debate on migration. In the discourse, they are to be seen in relation to the social climate. Migration – like other issues in Germany – did not experience a democratic new beginning in 1945. There was no zero hour. On the contrary, some of the same people continued after 1945, pushing ‘foreigners’ and ‘non-Germans’ back to the margins of ethnic German society under the new aliens legislation. This is clearly demonstrated by recent historical research on migration and racism, such as the work of historian Maria Alexopoulo. At that time, it was the survivors of the Shoah and the so-called displaced persons who became the ‘first foreigners.’
Anyone who places immigration control policies in a historical context will find that they are relatively new in historical terms. Some legal historians, such as Tendayi Achiume, see the US Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 as the first migration policy that used nationalist and racist arguments to screen out specific immigration movements. To enforce it, then-President Chester A. Arthur needed an enormous bureaucracy, control agents, and in some cases military equipment. In other words, the supposedly sovereign right of states to exclude was not given to them at birth, but was established a good 140 years ago in the context of economic and political considerations – and against the resistance of countries of the global South, which even then insisted on an anti-discriminatory open immigration policy.
In the case of Germany, the framing of migration as a central problem of national and social cohesion already has a long history. In the face of a solid and – it seems – growing right-wing populist electorate that rejects not only migrants but also democracy and the rule of law itself, this framing is not only fatal, but also toxic and corrosive. It endangers not only those who are repeatedly marked by this discourse formation as not belonging, as foreign, and as a burden, but also the very democratic order and social cohesion that guarantees the continued existence of the rule of law.
‘Hostile Environment’ policy
In doing so, it is moving the public discourse on migration further and further away from the actual situation. There is a decoupling of political, increasingly shrill proposals for solving the problem from reality. The central focus of right-wing populist ideology production, which functions above all through the politics of fear and permanent agitation, has led to a climate in which no measures seem to be beyond political possibility. The AfD’s call for remigration is less surprising than the FDP’s call for a ‘hostile environment’ policy, which once saw itself as a party of civil rights and now wants a ‘bread and soap’ strategy for rejected refugees who cannot be deported. Politicians like to point to England and Denmark – both governed by Social Democrats. While the number of those seeking asylum is falling there, the creation of a xenophobic environment has led to more violence and rampant racism.
As recently as 2012, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled in a landmark decision on the Asylum Seekers Benefits Act that “human dignity cannot be relativized in terms of migration policy.” Since then, this principle has been extremely relativized more than once at the legal level. Meanwhile, in the field of migration policy, law and legislation, be it international and European human rights, international legal standards or national laws, are presented as obstacles and openly ignored by EU member states. In September 2023, former German President and East German civil rights activist Joachim Gauck said on German television that limiting immigration was not “morally reprehensible” but a “political imperative” and that to do so “we have to go new ways that initially sound inhumane and are therefore unattractive.” He called on politicians to be more courageous and “less afraid of policies that sound brutal.” Just three weeks later, Chancellor Scholz was on the cover of Der Spiegel, demanding that “we” finally “deport on a large scale.” Jens Spahn then called on the Bundestag to stop “irregular migration movements” if necessary “by physical force.” In January 2025, the CDU, FDP and AfD voted together in the Bundestag for the first time in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. The CDU had previously submitted a five-point motion to limit migration and implement a more effective deportation policy.
In the early 1990s, discourse researchers at the Duisburg Institute for Language and Discourse Research (DISS) analyzed the speeches of center-wing politicians and found that they acted as ‘incendiaries.’ By using drastic images and words, politicians declared an emergency and staged a loss of state control in order to push through the first major reform of asylum law in parliament in 1993. Analyses of this reform, as well as of the ‘escalation of racist violence’ in the early 1990s, show how the two phenomena were causally linked and actively interacted with by politicians, the media and right-wing street activists. In this context, historian Patrice Poutros speaks of a “combination of political mobilization, campaign journalism, and racist violence” that made the March 1993 Bundestag vote possible.
Visions of cohesion
Before and after the reform, migration became an electoral issue, even for centrist parties. This had a similar effect as today, reinforcing the shift to the right across the party spectrum, as centrist parties adopted the rhetoric of the far-right NPD, and later the REP and DVU, rather than distancing themselves from it, as the then CDU leader in Baden-Württemberg, Teufel, put it: “Nobody should have to vote for the NPD because of this.” In this competition to outdo each other, however, the right-wing spectrum will always win – as the last 45 years have shown. The original is always more attractive and credible to voters than the opportunistic wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Looking back at the discourse, we have to say that it makes it impossible to address real social problems in the sense of its twisted translation, but rather obscures them. The solutions that are propagated are often not suitable for achieving what they propagate: controlling migration, regulating it, or at least skimming off the economic benefits of migrant labor in the neoliberal sense. Rather, the so-called solutions contribute to a considerable degree of chaos in the migration process and to a waste of human resources that industrialized countries, and Germany in particular, cannot afford. The legal scholars Gammelthoft-Hanen and Tan speak of a deterrence regime that the EU and its member states have now established. At the end of the Cold War, 200 kilometers of border were fenced; today it is just over 2000 kilometers. In percentage terms, fences covered 1.7 percent of the borders then, compared to 15.5 percent today.
Legal scholar Anuscheh Farahat recently put it succinctly. The rationales of control policies create a hungry beast, as they lead to ever harsher controls and measures, because those enacted do not achieve the desired effects. Numerous studies from the 1990s already show that flight and migration movements cannot be stopped by militarized and violent border regimes. They may be temporarily diverted and disappear for a while, but they will reappear elsewhere. Above all, they increase the social, physical and psychological costs of forced migration. What the European states buy with their militarization and brutalization of migration and border policies may be a little time, but they cannot organize the movements. Migration researchers Matthew J. Gibney and Randall Hansen of Oxford University therefore describe deterrence policies as inefficient but essential: In terms of their effect on migration, policies are often inefficient, but their effect on society is essential. Deterrence policies create feelings and images that allow states to demonstrate the strong state that appears to protect and control its population, which is imagined to be homogeneous and white. This, too, is a central element in the production of right-wing populist ideology.
This leads to a tragic result of these policies: not only do they solve nothing, but they play into the hands of those who always knew that mainstream politics would solve nothing. They bite the hand that feeds them and endanger the democratic order. In the interest of cohesion, however, it is much more important not to stylize migration as a mantra-like problem, but rather, precisely in view of the factuality of immigration, to finally start making policies and formulating visions of cohesion in and for a migration society.