For his part, Philip Ruddock, the architect of offshoring, is proud of the fact that once refugees are sent off to the Pacific, there is generally no access to Australia’s considerably more advanced legal system. He is satisfied that the Australian government no longer has any responsibility or jurisdiction over them. “We’ve satisfied ourselves that if a person is a refugee, they will not be returned to persecution,” he says, and if they are intercepted by the Royal Australian Navy and sent to a third country, Australia has no further obligation to process them.25 “If the situation changes back home, and it’s safe for them to return, you can return them,” he adds. The risk, human rights lawyers are quick to point out, is refoulement, the legal term for forcing an asylum-seeker back into danger, which is prohibited by the Refugee Convention.
Ruddock is a savvy lawyer himself, and he knows how to find ways around international legal concepts. “the obligation is non-refoulement,” he argues. “It is not an obligation to give people permanent residency … and it doesn’t mean you have to give your family and all your offspring an entitlement to come,” hence his idea of temporary protection, which was initially dismissed as draconian but then wholeheartedly embraced when it proved politically useful. As Ruddock puts it bluntly, “Because you can’t refoule them, then don’t give them anything more than you have to.” But he is not particularly concerned about verifying the safety of the situation they’re returning to. “There’s no obligation to verify,” he tells me. “We can’t send our officials in to see whether or not you’re abusing your nationals,” he says.26 In other words, someone could be sent back to a place that isn’t safe at all.27
Ahmed and Marwan, the Syrian refugees who were adrift at sea when Australia changed its laws, were also at Villawood in early 2016, after having been transferred for medical reasons. Their problems started in March 2014, when another riot swept through the detention camp on Manus Island where Reza Barati was killed and private security personnel put it down; several asylum-seekers were beaten by the guards. Ahmed was assaulted by a guard and later had a heart attack. He was flown to Brisbane, at taxpayer expense, more than 1,500 miles away for treatment. He was placed on suicide watch after threatening to kill himself if returned to detention. Nevertheless, he was flown back in April and soon had another heart attack and was diagnosed with PTSD.28 Once again, Ahmed was flown to Australia because facilities in Papua New Guinea were deemed inadequate. The various doctors treating him noted acute anxiety about being deported to Syria or returned to the scene of the riot; they recommended releasing him into the care of his relatives living in Australia, who had offered to financially support him. Instead, he was kept in detention.
Considering his circumstances, Ahmed is a relatively jovial man. He eagerly tells his story as he chain-smokes. “Manus was like a hell,” he says. “I was starving there. I saw death there. We were attacked by the locals. They said, ‘You should go back to your country.’” The first time we met in January 2016, he was worried that his eldest son would be conscripted into the Syrian army. The next time we spoke, he told me his son had reached Slovenia and was trying to get to Germany.29
Marwan looks far less well. He is thin (he lost over two stone during his six-month hunger strike), nervous, and easily distracted. His eyes dart around, and his legs occasionally shake. He is visibly worried when talking about his wife and son still in Syria. His niece and nephew in the house next door were killed when a bomb fell on it. He told doctors that soon after arriving on Manus Island, there was a riot “with dogs tearing people and people being shot at and people being killed, …which was like what I experienced in Syria.” He told the doctors, “I swear on God I will kill myself” if ever returned to Manus. He tells a similar story in person, sitting in a covered outdoor visitors’ area within the Villawood detention centre as a torrential thunderstorm sweeps through Sydney.
“There was no humanity,” says Marwan. “I was there when the Iranian died,” he adds, referring to Barati. He is furious at Australia at this point. “Give me one month to go to any embassy,” he says, exasperated. “Let me have a chance!” he exclaims. “If we do something wrong, put me in the jail.… You have the choice to refuse me, but you don’t have the choice to put me in PNG third world. I ran away from war!”30
Ahmed and Marwan’s fears are well founded. In late 2015, there were eighteen Syrians in detention in Australian or offshore centres. The nineteenth Syrian, a man they both know, was sent home and offers a cautionary tale. The Australian television journalist Ginny Stein tracked down the man who, in despair over his indefinite detention and encouraged by immigration authorities, signed papers permitting him to be voluntarily repatriated. Declassified government e-mail records show that the IOM, which usually assists with such repatriations, refused to get involved. The IOM bluntly told the Australian government that it does not take people back to Syria because it refuses to “return individuals to situations of vulnerability.”31 As the Syrian’s case proved, Australia has no qualms doing so.
The Australian government gave him just over $2,300 before leaving.32 The man’s intention was to escape in transit and fly to Turkey where he could seek safety in a refugee camp, but he couldn’t escape immigration officials in Qatar when changing planes. He was singled out as soon as he arrived in Damascus with a wad of foreign currency and was accused of financing the Syrian revolution. Then, he claims, he was tortured for twenty days before being released. Soon after his return home, he was injured by shrapnel from an artillery shell that landed four meters away; it killed his father. Still, he told the journalist Stein, “I am free.”33
When leaders try to do the opposite of what Australia has done for the past fifteen years, as Angela Merkel has attempted in Germany, there is a political price to pay.
Merkel was the exception in 2015 in a world overcome by fear and reaction; her vision was the opposite of Australia’s effort to exert total control over its borders, even when it required callous indifference to the plight of refugees and a willingness to treat them terribly to deter others from coming. She rejected the Australian model that so many on the European far right dream of replicating, but she may have overreached in her leniency and compassion. There were dissenters in Merkel’s party who warned that there would be political consequences for her border policy; no one quite imagined how dramatic they might be.
On September 4, 2016, almost a year to the day after she opened the country’s borders, Angela Merkel’s CDU was defeated by the upstart far-right party, AfD, in the small northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The new party took 21 percent of the vote. It was the latest in a string of setbacks that began in March when the AfD had strong showings in two other states. But Mecklenburg was different; it was Merkel’s home turf. She grew up in the East German town of Templin, just north of Berlin, and watched the wall go up as a seven-year-old. Two weeks after her party lost her home state, a similar battering occurred in Berlin’s municipal election, where the CDU suffered its worst ever result, taking under 18 percent of the vote while the AfD came third with almost 15 percent.
Finally, Merkel accepted some direct responsibility, telling the press, “If I could, I would turn back time by many, many years to better prepare myself and the whole German government for the situation that reached us unprepared in late summer 2015.” She maintained that her policy had been “absolutely right,” but admitted that it had “led to a time when we did not have enough control over the situation.”34
It was not Merkel’s only political headache; two months later, she was humiliated at the CDU party congress by a junior colleague almost half her age. Jens Spahn, the deputy finance minister and a rising star in Merkel’s CDU, stood just a few feet away from the chancellor when he took the microphone to weigh in on the internal party debate about whether Germany should ban dual citizenship, a law that Merkel had reversed in recent years in a deal with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), allowing foreigners—mostly Turks—to keep their foreign passports and become
naturalized Germans. Taking the floor after Merkel’s interior minister and the party’s general secretary had spoken in favor of her plan, Spahn declared, “Of course you have to make compromises in a governing coalition, but we’re at a party convention.” As the Spiegel reporters in the room wrote, “The applause was so loud that it was immediately clear that he would emerge victorious.”35 Spahn had accomplished a rare feat: he’d stood up to Merkel and won.
When the refugees started to arrive en masse, it was a moral question for many people. But for Spahn, it was a political one, especially for his own party. “We have lost the trust of too many people,” Spahn told me when we met in the cafeteria of the Bundestag on a sweltering July day.
For him, the refugee policy was decided on the fly. “Would we have been able to withstand this in a public debate?” he asks. “Can we survive it?” But there was not a public debate, and he and other CDU members who dissented within the party ranks lost the internal one.36
Suddenly, the influx of one million people was a fait accompli. Spahn worries that the CDU, once the party of law and order, is losing the trust of voters on the issues that have always been its bread and butter. People no longer feel safe on trains and public transit, he says, a sentiment that only became more acute in the summer of 2016 after a spate of attacks throughout southern Germany and in the wake of the Berlin Christmas market atrocity.
Spahn says he is fighting back against a party he believes has been “too accommodating of a liberal elite that has become convinced of its own moral superiority.” He is concerned that his party could start hemorrhaging voters to the AfD the way that other centrist parties in Europe have—from British Labour to Denmark’s Social Democrats—and refuses to allow them to “co-opt issues like family or the fear of Islamism.” Nor does he think it helps to “immediately cry ‘racism’ when somebody voices anxiety that immigration is eroding the homeland.”37
Spahn has another trait that differentiates him from most members of the conservative CDU—he’s gay. Spahn famously came out in a speech to the assembled conservative party representatives by telling them he never wanted to be the victim of an attack while walking down the street with his boyfriend. Some of the more traditional conservatives still don’t quite know how to speak about his sexuality, resorting to odd formulations about his “family situation” or calling him “a pleasant homosexual.”38
Spahn didn’t realize at the time that his sexual orientation might also prove politically useful. He speaks of his move from rural Germany near the Dutch border to the middle of Berlin as a “liberating experience” and seems to realize that being gay gives him flexibility that other politicians don’t have. He calls it “leg room.” The sentence “not every culture is an enrichment,” for example, doesn’t grate in the same way it might coming from an old, straight conservative.39
Spahn is fully aware that the refugee influx and the emergence of the AfD has made some strange bedfellows. “The most funny thing about it,” he told me, “is that now the conservatives in my own party start to defend women’s and gay rights.” Spahn admits that “it’s ironic, yes.” But, he continues, “if you have repeated it publicly often enough, you start to believe it.”40
In much the same way that the late Pim Fortuyn’s homosexuality was instrumentalized to help redefine what it meant to be right wing in Holland, Spahn’s rise within the CDU may be doing the same for Germany’s conservative establishment—and is perhaps helping to shut the AfD out of that ideological space despite their selection of Alice Weidel, a thirty-eight-year-old lesbian, as one of their top candidates.41
Spahn was not the only dissenter in the CDU ranks.
“I was actually sceptical from the very first day,” insists Philipp Lengsfeld, a young bespectacled member of parliament who represents the CDU in Berlin Mitte, the heart of the capital and a district that straddles the old wall between East and West. “Parts of society were on the verge of hysteria.… It sent the wrong signals to the wrong people,” he told me in July 2016, two months before the election debacle in Berlin.
He doesn’t blame Ms. Merkel alone. “It was the whole society,” he says. “It was the media, church, all sorts of NGOs, activists, and so forth. Everybody was like ‘welcome’! We have to save the world.” There is something very German about this impulse, according to Lengsfeld. “Either we want to conquer the world, or we want to save the world; it’s always a little over the edge,” he adds.42 It is also a particularly West German sensibility that lingers more than twenty-five years after unification. For Lengsfeld, who grew up in East Germany, this saviour complex is foreign. His personal history is deeply bound up with East Germany’s. Both his grandfather and stepfather were Stasi officers, the latter spying on his mother, Vera, a well-known human rights campaigner in East Germany throughout the 1980s, when Philipp was growing up.43
As the refugee crisis grew more acute in September 2015 with the corpses of refugees found in a lorry outside Vienna and the body of Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach, there was pressure to act. The message from Germany’s opinion leaders was “we are so strong, we are so good, we are an example to the world. This is all West German thinking. It has nothing to do with the reality of the eastern states,” Lengsfeld insists. People in the east weren’t feeling “we are so wealthy, we need to share.… This is all luxury thinking of the West, of the liberal people from the West who never even saw that there is an East Germany. Who always lived in virtual Europe,” he argues.
This West German thinking, he insists, explains why so many more voters in what was once East Germany are abandoning the CDU and other mainstream parties to vote for the populist AfD. As a German foreign ministry official puts it less generously, “People complain about the harsh anti-refugee backlash in Hungary and Poland. We have our own central Europe within Germany.”44
Lengsfeld isn’t hostile to refugees, but he is convinced that many who crossed the border last September were not fleeing persecution. Young men were, as he put it, “sitting in Casablanca watching the news and said, wow, willkommenskultur in Germany, that’s the place to go.” For some, it wasn’t about fleeing; it was about a better life. And by declaring the German borders open, the government effectively gave an incentive to people in the Balkans and North Africa to try their luck, he contends. “This was all mixed together; everyone was called ‘refugee’ regardless of origin, background, hopes, expectatons.”
As the CDU debated its policy, a minority challenged the Chancellor’s position. “It doesn’t make sense at all,” Lengsfeld recalls thinking. “What is the plan? Are we inviting the world? Are we getting millions of migrants … in an uncontrolled, unchanneled manner? That was no plan. The counterargument was we cannot change it, this is like a natural catastrophe,” he recalls, visibly frustrated. “The majority of the party was on our side,” he adds. But Merkel made a decision and the party followed her, he says, “because we are loyal. We are conservative. We follow our leaders.”45
The business community went along with the policy, too, Lengsfeld believes, because “they were desperate for arguments,” but there were no good ones. It was “lies, all lies.” The idea that the German workforce was ageing and needed a fresh infusion of labour was a popular theme in the media in late 2015, but it was a fantasy, he insists. They were hoping to train new workers, but it was an unrealistic hope. “You don’t solve that by uncontrolled asylum migration,” Lengsfeld argues. “How can you expect that people from a totally different culture, who don’t speak a word of German, who are not able to read and write, to go and to solve our high-tech job issue? It’s crazy!”46
Spahn agrees. There were many people in government and corporate circles who thought an infusion of young people would be good for the labour market. To him, it was all “wishful thinking.” All these people under twenty-five might have looked appealing to a country with one of the oldest workforces in the world, but they all still needed language skills and training. “To make it a real demographic relief,”
Spahn maintains “we need two-year-olds to come, not twenty-year-olds.”
In the United States, there’s hardly any social safety net, so people who arrive, whether legally or illegally, immediately seek work. By contrast, in Germany, “you can survive for ten years without ever having to work,” Spahn argues. But for him, the question is not about whether the economy profits from the influx. Spahn is certain it won’t in the near term. “To make it an economic plus, at least half of them must add more to our economy and our GDP than the average German.”
The best thing Germany can do now, he says, is try to integrate as many people as possible so the financial burden is low. In the 1990s, when hundreds of thousands of refugees from the former Yugoslavia came, unemployment was high so there wasn’t a question of letting people work. Now there is a need, but the skills don’t match apart from a few engineers and doctors among the refugees, says Spahn. “The very best case is if this is, in ten or twenty years’ time, an economic plus.”47
Aydan Özoğuz has a rosier view, as one would expect from the German government’s commissioner for immigration, refugees, and integration. She is a member of the Social Democratic Party but serves in Merkel’s coalition government. She has been at the centre of the government’s policy response and its shifts as the open-door policy has become less popular, including the negotiation of Merkel’s controversial deal with Turkey, the country her parents came from.
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