For all its horror, what happened on New Year’s Eve in Cologne and other German cities might help the Germans solve a longstanding problem. The issue is not the one-million-plus refugees who have come to us in the first place. It is how to deal with problems that immigrants might be, are or will be causing.
More than 650 criminal complaints have been filed by women in Cologne regarding that night, and more than 150 in Hamburg, including two cases of rape. A 28-year-old women named Katia said: “Suddenly I felt a hand on my bum, on my breasts, I was grabbed everywhere, it was horrific. I was desperate, it was like running the gantlet. Over the space of 200 meters, I think I must have been touched about 100 times.” Of the 50 suspects identified in Cologne, the bulk are from northern Africa, mostly from Morocco.
These are uncomfortable facts. And until now, Germans have struggled to find an appropriate, decent way to address the issues they raise, without being labeled a Nazi or a fool. At last, this is changing. If Willkommenskultur, the welcoming culture, was the word of the year for 2015, this year’s leading candidate should be Ehrlichkeitskultur, the honesty culture. Cologne has been the catalyst: It shows that we must talk more frankly, yet not less responsibly, about immigration.
It is now up to Chancellor Angela Merkel to transform the new soberness into action. She has already made corrections to her open-door policy, including a stricter deportation law for immigrants who commit crimes. But she’ll have to do even more, and she’ll have to do it quickly.
The news about the Cologne attacks resembled a bomb going off in slow motion, and its effects have been absorbed just as slowly, in less of a panic than a controlled shock. First, the police in Cologne withheld information about the mass sexual assaults (the police chief later resigned). When the details started to emerge, journalists were reluctant to admit the mere possibility that refugees had been involved, although this was pretty obvious from various witness accounts early on.
All the while, the political left tried to play down the event. Claudia Roth, a Bundestag leader from the Green Party, compared the mass crimes in Cologne to the sexual harassments that she said happen every year at the Munich Oktoberfest (which police records show to be false). The head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany warned that it would be a “major mistake” to draw any conclusions about the cultural backgrounds of these men. If this sounds like ignorance and appeasement, it is.
In fact, the attacks do fit a pattern: According to the Cologne police, 40 percent of the city’s immigrants from northern Africa become delinquent, mainly for theft, within their first year in Germany. Another problem, the police say, is that in order to avoid deportation, many asylum seekers from this region ditch their passports so that their home country is unknown.
The charge that economic immigrants are masquerading as refugees, long denied here — including by Ms. Merkel herself — is now painfully, undeniably true. And why wouldn’t it be? If you’re a 20-something Moroccan without any job prospects, and suddenly an airline ticket to Istanbul equals an entry ticket into Europe, wouldn’t you take your chance?
The problem, as Cologne demonstrates, is that potentially thousands of these men are criminals, with no other aim than to rob and betray their hosts. This is despicable and unbearable.
Ms. Merkel should acknowledge that she underestimated this problem. The continuation of Willkommenskultur depends on her embracing an Ehrlichkeitskultur. In particular, she must do three things.
First, find a way to separate the free riders and criminals from the refugees. Thanks to the lack of identity checks at the borders in the past months, we just don’t know whether many of those who have poured into Germany have done so for good reasons or bad. This has to be established now by all possible means, by taking fingerprints, photos and other personal information and exchanging them with authorities in the home countries.
Then we need to deport those who have no right to stay, quickly and visibly. The German government says that currently, 8,000 people from northern Africa, mostly from Morocco and Tunisia, are obliged to leave Germany, but they can’t be sent back because their home countries won’t accept them without papers. These countries need to be pressured into cooperation.
Finally, we have to be willing to intern those who arrive without passports. This sounds harsh, but it is appropriate. People who cross the border without ID must be prevented from roaming freely within Germany. Once in semi-custody (meaning that you cannot get into Germany, but you’re free to go home), it wouldn’t take long to determine where they came from, and why.
The idea isn’t new: Special sites for people from the Balkans who filed mostly pointless asylum requests after the fighting there were set up in Bavaria. This has reduced the influx from these countries considerably.
Ms. Merkel has said that right now, our country needs to draw on a new German pragmatism. Yes, but it also needs German thoroughness, not least for the sake of the real refugees who need our protection. Without a cleareyed Ehrlichkeitskultur that addresses real problems in a reasonable tone, we risk seeing it fall into the hands of the growing far right.
Jochen Bittner is a political editor for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit.