Germany Mulls Tightening Asylum Laws to Quell Migration

Germany may need to rethink its liberal migration policies in the face of rising numbers of undocumented arrivals, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner said.

“We need a change in the migration policy like the asylum compromise from the beginning of the 1990s,” Lindner said in a post on X on Saturday, referring to a 1993 tightening of migration legislation that prevented people entering from a safe third country from being granted asylum.

Since political asylum is guaranteed in the German constitution, a tightening of restrictions would require a two-thirds majority in parliament. Lindner, who is head of the liberal FDP Party, said that Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck from the Greens and CDU leader Friedrich Merz were also open to reform.

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“If we don’t want the right-wing populists to exploit this topic, then all democratic parties are obliged to help with the search for solutions,” Habeck told the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland, a conglomerate of local newspapers. The former Green Party leader described the situation as “dramatic.”

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