A leading immigration expert has warned that Germany is facing a “demographic time bomb” if it allows the massive influx of alleged refugees from Syria to become citizens as they will be enabled to bring their family members to the country.
A Dutch social scientist who is described as the top migration expert in Germany, Ruud Koopmans, has warned of the massive implications for the makeup of German society that chain migration represents. He argued that the government should consider whether it is the interest of the country to grant citizenship to the near million supposed refugees from Syria.
Speaking to Cicero magazine, Koopmans said that while there has been positive steps made, such as scrapping the so-called “turbo naturalization” of allowing migrants to apply for citizenship after just three years, the standard five-year process remains in place and can still “be considered a demographic time bomb in the long run.”
“We have almost one million Syrian refugees in Germany. It is necessary to think about the consequences of this for the future. This one million people has a great overrepresentation of men. They will look for their partners mostly in the country of origin. This is extremely likely because in these countries, marriages usually take place within large families. In these societies, marriage is also an economic business between families, and the ticket to Europe is an important means of exchange,” the Dutch social scientist said.
The migration expert said that if past is prologue, pointing to the influx of guest workers from Turkey and Morocco in the 1970s which after obtaining citizenship en masse saw their populations balloon six or sevenfold, the same could be expected by the Syrian cohort that arrived after former German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the gates to migration in 2015 sparking the European Migrant Crisis.
Thus, it could be expected that over the next five decades the Syrian population could grow to a staggering seven million if no action is taken, Koopmans warned. This, he noted, would also hold true for other migrant groups, such as those from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia.
“One has to think about whether one should offer refugees access to German citizenship as quickly as possible. If they are German nationals, there is no limit to family migration. Then any possibility of controlling these migration flows has passed. This is a dramatic perspective,” he said.
Koopmans stressed that there must be a reckoning over what the actual purpose of refugee schemes are, saying that in contrast to regular immigration, in which the country actively seeks to recruit foreign talent, asylum schemes should mostly be temporary in nature and that those who are in the country for only a few years should ultimately be told to go back to their homelands as has similarly been proposed by figures like Brexit boss Nigel Farage in the UK.
“Especially with refugees, it is mostly about people from countries with very patriarchal, traditional family structures, where the expectation is much greater that there will be an extensive succession migration through marriages. This is not very important in politics at the moment, but if you look at the longer-term look, that should worry us,” he said.
Furthermore, Koopmans noted that not all migrant populations are equally able to integrate into German society and that certain groups are significantly overrepresented in crime, particularly those from countries like Afghanistan and Syria.
“People are not fleeing for nothing – either because their countries are economically dysfunctional, because there is war or because of oppression. These are dysfunctional states, and the people who come from these states usually do not have the education, knowledge and experience necessary to be successful on the German labor market. This explains why these groups are so overrepresented in social assistance statistics,” he said.
In addition to rolling back the ability of refugees to qualify for citizenship, the migration expert pointed to plans of establishing “repatriation hubs” in third party countries for illegal migrants, as has been done by the Trump administration in the United States with El Salvador and which Giorgia Meloni’s government in Italy is currently battling the EU courts to establish in Albania.
Although there has yet to be any repatriation hub scheme enacted in Europe, Koopmans said that there may be signs of hope, with signals of support from Berlin being critical to moving the bloc as a whole to adopting such policies.
“Until now, the choice was very limited, and people were forced to negotiate with Turkey or Tunisia. Now we have a much wider range of possibilities and can make better arrangements without making ourselves dependent on a country. This is an enormous progress.”
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