Thread by @AndrewHammel1

1/ WHY GERMANY CAN'T DEPORT ANYONE

Die Welt just published an important article on why Germany can't deport anyone. Currently there are 250,000 people living in Germany who have no right to be here. welt.de/politik/deutsc…

2/ Most of these are rejected asylum seekers or people who have committed serious crimes. They're called "Ausreisepflichtige" because they have been informed they have a "duty" (Pflicht) to leave the country. Only a trivial fraction leave voluntarily, since life in Germany

3/ is invariably a thousand times more appealing than life in whatever country they left. So why can't Germany deport these people? The first problem is that 50% of them arrived with no identity papers, some even erasing their own fingerprints with acid.

4/ These migrants are no dummies -- the weaker their asylum claims, the likelier they are to obscure their identity. German authorities must undertake a long, expensive, wearisome procedure to establish who they are and where they came from. Once that's done, they

5/ ask the country of origin to issue temporary ID papers. Many countries of origin refuse to do so or slow-walk the procedure. Maybe they're not eager to repatriate a rapist, or they are more interested in getting the young man's (70% are men) remittances from black.

6/ market work in Germany than they are in adding another to the massive hordes of unemployed, disaffected young males who make so much trouble in their societies. So Germany usually gives up and just issues documents to the illegal immigrant saying his presence in the country

7/ will be "tolerated" indefinitely (Duldung). Yet the authorities do sometimes succeed in getting a deportation order. According to frustrated police officials and bureaucrats who leaked information to "Die Welt" (incredibly, much of this information is non-public).

8/ German authorities obtained 47,760 deportation orders in 2023. Only 16,430 ended with an actual completed deportation. So, 6% of the total number of people residing illegally in German. What happened to the other 2/3 of attempted deportations?

9/ 56 were canceled for physical resistance by the deportee, 86 after doctors said there were "medical grounds" against deportation, 230 times airplane pilots refused to let deportees on the plane. But by far the most common reason was that the police couldn't find the

10/ person to serve the deportation order. Deportees are actually informed in advance that the police are about to come deport them, and many choose to go underground. Police can arrest deportees and hold them, but only for 10 days. If the

11/ stone-age, fax-driven German bureaucracy can't process the final paperwork in that time, they have to be released, after which they promptly disappear. Something like this frustrated almost 30,000 of the 47,000 planned deportations last year.

12/ Germany sometimes charters flights to avoid the problem of commercial captains refusing passage. This is of course incredibly expensive, and also wasteful, since a source tells Die Welt that there's an average no-show rate of 60% for these flights. The system simply

13/ books 200 seats anticipating that all the deportees will obediently show up, and then 60% disappear underground at the last minute. Somehow the bumbling German bureaucracy has not found a solution to this obvious problem despite decades of experience.

14/ So to sum up, once an illegal immigrant lands in Germany, there's a 90% chance they will be able to stay as long as they wish. German laws and regulations are so pockmarked with loopholes that deportation only occurs when the deportee basically accepts their fate.

15/ The other unintended consequence of this regime is that it's the most honest, law-abiding illegal immigrants who get deported, because they're much easier to find. Some manage to raise families and even start businesses without

16/ clearing up their immigration status. And when their name pops up, it's child's play to locate them. So German immigration law, in many cases, expels immigrants who are much better integrated than the ones who disappear underground.

17/ Whenever you contemplate why more and more Germans are drawn to populist parties, it's helpful to keep in mind that this utterly broken system was designed over decades by every German mainstream party, and none of them has any coherent plan to fix it.

@AschRonald ...although it's never the judges and bureaucrats who have to sacrifice anything themselves, mind you.

@fckisam1676 And trust me, I've spoken with dozens of German welfare bureaucrats and they all assure me that it's nearly impossible to detect fraudulent recipients, I asked a guy in D'Dorf how many on the welfare rolls here were foreigners and he said "80%".

@fckisam1676 Basically you show up with false papers in Georgian or Albanian or some other language, get a "Duldung", and then the welfare bureaucrat has a choice: 1. launch a complex and expensive investigation to verify the papers, or 2. just grant the welfare request? Not only

@fckisam1676 does 1. require massive loads of paperwork, thanks to insane German bureaucracy, it's also likely to be more expensive than 10 years of welfare.