With over a month to go until Germany's federal elections, one branch of the AfD party in Karlsruhe released a mock plane ticket purporting to send "illegal migrants" back to "a safe country of origin." This is one in a series of strong positions the party is taking on migration, but how many of their policies could they potentially enact, even if they were to win power?
Germany’s AfD (Alternative for Germany) party has been placed under investigation by police on charges of inciting racial hatred. This comes after a local chapter of the far-right party distributed election campaign material that could be considered not only offensive but potentially unlawful.
In the city of Karlsruhe, the AfD designed campaign leaflets in the shape of, and with the appearance of pseudo one-way plane tickets, intended to send people it refers to as "illegal immigrants" to "safe countries of origin" if it were to win the upcoming February election.
About 30,000 of these flyers were reportedly distributed in the Karlsruhe area, according to the German press agency dpa. Some users on social media claimed the flyers were thrown into the letterboxes of people who potentially had a migrant background. However, according to dpa, the local AfD party said that the flyers were aimed at all eligible voters. They have also stated they believe the flyers are totally legal and legitimate.
However, the mayor of Karlsruhe, Frank Mentrup, told the news agency Associated Press (AP) that he believed the leaflets had "crossed a red line." He added that he believed finding "such notes in the letterbox [would] reinforce a feeling of fear and insecurity."
Even though the party is far from likely to be involved in government at all, as all other major parties have ruled out entering a coalition with it, the AfD continues to make strong statements about its intentions to change migration policy if it were to win enough votes to enter power. It is currently polling in second place and expects to win around 20 percent of the vote.
So what are some of the changes the AfD hopes to make to migration policy, and how feasible might they be?
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Closed borders and 'remigration'
On Sunday (January 12), during the AfD's party congress, the current co-chair and chancellor candidate Alice Weidel repeated the party's belief that borders had to be "closed completely" to undocumented migrants, and that mass deportations of people who had been refused the right to stay in Germany should be enacted.
Back in 2023, far-right leaders from several European countries met to discuss the idea of "remigration." At the time, the group said they wanted to send everyone with a migrant background back to the countries of their forefathers, including in some cases people who had already obtained German citizenship.
At that time, Weidel distanced herself from these statements. But at the party congress on Sunday, she deliberately repeated the word "remigration" several times in her speech. However, listening to the statements on either side of the term, she underlined that she wanted only those who were in Germany "illegally" to be sent back, which would automatically exclude anyone who held German citizenship or residency, or any other official reason to be in Germany.
During the same speech, Weidel also promised that anyone found to be "illegally" in Germany would be sent back immediately on February 23, election day. Even if the AfD were to win a landslide victory and be able to hold power alone, which is very difficult in the current German election system, no party can enact its policies on election day.
The final results tend to come in either late on election day, or by the following day, and then a process of coalition talks start. Any future government would not be able to start changing policy for several months, and would require their new laws to go through the normal processes of votes in both German houses of parliament, with the ensuing modifications and debates.
Controversial statements
Alice Weidel is no stranger to political controversy. She has often made divisive and controversial statements in Germany's lower house of parliament, the Bundestag and during election campaigns. In those statements, she often amplifies certain events -- such as cases of migrant crimes -- while sometimes ignoring the factual context.
A member of the Bundestag since 2017, one of Weidel’s most incendiary comments was a year into her tenure as an MP when she reacted to a migration debate and the potential benefits of immigration with the following statement:
"Burqas, girls in headscarves, knifemen enjoying social support, and other no-goods will hardly help to secure (Germany’s) wealth, growth and social system."
This remark appeared to equate most or all immigrants with extremists, criminals and misogynists, and was at the time picking up on the belief that the majority of crimes in Germany might be committed by migrants.
Crime statistics
German police statistics in 2022 and 2023 show that in fact, about two-thirds of all crime suspects were German citizens.
As for the remaining third, there is no distinction being made in the statistics between foreign citizens residing legally in Germany, refugees with protection status, failed asylum seekers, irregular migrants without papers and pure tourists who happen to have become crime suspects.
However, more than half of those crimes recorded among non-Germans were actually violations of immigration law. This only leaves about one in six other crimes (including but not limited to violent crime) being committed by non-German individuals.
Furthermore, the police don't always disclose statistics about how many of these overall crime suspects eventually were prosecuted for committing a crime, and which cases were eventually dropped.
Read AlsoFact check: False and misleading claims by AfD’s Alice Weidel in German TV interview
A dystopian replacement plan?
Another focus of many far-right movements in the West is the so-called Great Replacement theory, which some senior AfD members like former party leader Alexander Gauland and deputy leader Beatrix von Storch have repeatedly made reference to.
This dystopian conspiracy theory pushes the notion that white European societies are systematically being replaced by non-white ethnicities through the support of policies of mass migration. It further postulates that global elites in international bodies like the EU or the UN are behind this supposed plan, and that they wish to see their goals come to fruition within one or two generations.
The core idea, popularized in France in the early 2010s, is presently rooted in Islamophobia as well as generic xenophobia but actually dates back a century when a similar conspiracy theory popularized as the so-called "Kalergi plan" also claimed that white populations were being undermined in a similar manner.
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A look at European demographics tells a different story, one that does not align with notions of mass migration or replacement. Around 450 million people currently live in the EU. Around six percent of the population is made up of non-EU foreigners.
This includes immigrants of all backgrounds, about 40 percent of whom are Ukrainian war refugees, whom white nationalist and far-right groups do not regard as part of this conspiracy theory; another 10 percent are immigrants from other countries they would classify as "white" populations.
This means that only half of that six percent figure applies, i.e. around three percent, meaning 13,500,000 of 450 million people.
Read AlsoBehind the statistics: Crime, migration and labor shortages in Germany
The need for migrant labor
Most other German political parties and many economists acknowledge that wherever you might stand on irregular migration, Germany and many other Western European states are in need of legal labor migration in order to keep functioning and building strong economies for the future.
In the coming two decades, it is estimated there will be 1.7 million jobs in Germany with no one to fill these positions at the present rate. This is why successive governments have launched programs to bring in workers to address this crucial need for the labor market.
However, if the AfD were to have its way, legal immigration would only be made more difficult than it already is with Germany’s burdensome bureaucracy, which is why qualified foreigners already do not consider the EU nation their first choice when it comes to moving countries.
In fact, studies have indicated that the rhetoric of the AfD and other far-right movements over the past decade or so have tainted Germany’s image abroad as a destination; legal migration routes to Germany for skilled workers remain underused, in part because of this image problem.
Without migrant workers filling those positions, larger companies could seek to take their business abroad where they have access to a locally available workforce.
This in turn would severely affect Germany’s economic strength in the long run, and could also fuel emigration from Germany.
Still, AfD supporters continue sharing slogans like "Keep German jobs for Germans" — without perhaps realizing the real danger of the long-term damage they could be causing to the country and, ultimately, themselves.
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