How many times have we heard the rhetoric of stricter immigration controls yet nothing ever happens?

Good article – the only thing missing that might have been good to mention was the row between the Bundesregierung (the federal government) and the municipalities about the financing of migration costs. The article mentions that the government has now shaken loose some more money, but even that took a lot of tension and argument to achieve. For a long time, it was a case of the federal government holding the doors open for all the world and his wife but then leaving all the real and practical aspects of migration (from accomodation to schools) to the municipalities. The German Minister for the Interior, Nancy Faeser just seems like the most incompetent person imaginable.
“Under a new Europe-wide deal, Germany hopes for a more distribution of asylum-seekers and refugees across the continent — probably pie in the sky”.
Not “probably”. It IS pie in the sky. Why this redistribution is still being brought up when it has been clear for at least 5 years that it’s never going to fly is a mark of how lost politicians are with this.

Germany disappoints, more often than not. Famed for order and discipline, let us see if they will gain fame for righteousness and wisdom. I often see short-sighted decisions from this European country, feel-good thinking mingled with orderly thought, great ability lacking long-sighted direction. Is bravery missing from this modern iteration of Germany?

I don’t understand how it can be that the country is being overwhelmed with immigrants, yet German firms are struggling with finding workers.

If Germany won’t compete in a race to the bottom then they’ll win the race as the destination of choice for millions of illegal migrants and those with dubious asylum claims.

Earlier this week another Unherd article reported the Home Office’s concern that annual net immigration into the UK in 2023 may exceed one million (Yes, ONE MILLION!) – twice as many as in 2022 at 500,000 net.
That more than matches Merkel’s humanitarian gesture of 2015, all the more so as hers effectively admitted that number into Europe, not Germany alone.

‘We’ very generously and rather stupidly it must be said, ceded the island of Heligoland* to Germany in 1890.
They should now turn it into an ‘Internierungslager’ or Detention Camp with immediate effect.

Any overflow should be accommodated in a similar facility constructed by our good selves in Scapa Flow.

(* it wasn’t even there’s in the first place but Danish!)

You chaps should be reading the history of immigration into the US.
Let’s take the Irish, who started immigrating big time in the Potato Famine of the 1840s. They lived in ethnic ghettos as “shanty Irish” and had gangs and corrupt politics, and in New York City there were said to be 50,000 “nymphs of the pave.” Because I have limited experience of life on the pavement I have no idea what that means.
But, by the end of the 19th century people started to talk about “lace curtain Irish.”
Of course the best-behaved immigrants were the Germans. Who also had their potato famine in the 1840s. But it all collapsed in 2023 with Budweiser’s Bud Lite and transgender influencers.

Germany’s war guilt must never be forgotten… it had never been repayed.