A child tries to warm his hands, backdropped by Germany's flag at protest in Idomeni, Greece on 9 March 2016. Vadim Ghirda AP/Press Association. All rights reserved.
In the summer of 2015, at the high-point of the ‘summer of migration’, even ‘progressive’ media outlets that had just spent months criticising Germany’s treatment of Syriza seemed to lose all sense of critique when reporting on Germany's attitude towards those refugees arriving via the Balkan route. Hoping to shame other national authorities into letting more people in, articles cast Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, as the face of European values – as the face of humanity and solidarity. Ever since then, the struggles of refugees already living in Germany, Germany's role in shaping the Common European Asylum Policy, and the actual spirit of political debate and proposed legislation in Germany remain seldom discussed.
Germany passed numerous laws on migration and asylum in the months preceding and following the ‘summer of migration’. These have, amongst other things, increased the likelihood of administrative detention for people caught by the Dublin III agreement; increased status differences between refugees based on their country of origin; paved the way for quicker deportations to so-called ‘safe countries’, even those with long records of human rights violations; and generally further criminalised migration.
