POLITICS-GERMANY: First Ever Immigration Bill Passes Amid Uproar

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Yojana Sharma

BERLIN, Mar 22 2002 (IPS) - Germany’s first ever immigration bill passed the final legislative hurdle Friday amid scenes of chaos and uproar in the normally staid ‘Bundesrat’, upper house of parliament.

It will become law only after Federal President Johannes Rau has given his consent – after taking into account conflicting opinions expressed by constitutional experts Friday.

The proposed law that would make it easier for foreigners to settle in Germany was approved after an explosive parliamentary showdown. This reflected the emotiveness of a debate in a country that for years has refused to see itself as a country of immigration.

It followed weeks of intensive lobbying by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder whose Social Democratic Party (SPD) does not have a majority in the upper house.

The Bundesrat comprises representatives of Germany’s 16 state legislatures. Some of them are ruled by the opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister Christian Social Union (CSU) and others by various coalitions.

The Bundesrat “passed” the bill Friday only after a split vote by the two representatives of the state of Brandenburg was interpreted as a “yes” vote under parliamentary rules. This unleashed strong protest from the opposition CDU and CSU, whose representatives branded the vote as “false” and “unconstitutional”.

Edmund Stoiber, premier of the southern state of Bavaria, who is challenging Schroeder in the race for chancellorship next September described the vote as a “constitutional scandal” and promised: “This law will never come into force.”

Stoiber said that should the Christian Democrats come to power during the next national elections the immigration bill would be scrapped. “This is a bill that divides, not unites,” he said.

The Bavarian premier Stoiber’s CSU and its sister party CDU had wanted tighter rules particularly on family reunion. He had also said immigrants should only be allowed into the country if there is a “concrete job” awaiting them that a German cannot take up.

However the bill allows for qualified persons from countries other than those of the 15-nation European Union (EU) to come to Germany, settle and seek work based on their skills.

Despite the uproar over the way in which the government secured a “yes” vote in the Bundesrat, the opposition stopped short of saying it would challenge the proceedings in the country’s constitutional court.

Instead it shot the ball firmly in the court of Federal President Johannes Rau to “ensure the bill was constitutional” before signing it into law.

Chancellor Schroeder said he was “very satisfied” with the Bundesrat vote and said it was “absurd” to characterise the vote as unconstitutional. “The bill has been passed according to the rules,” he said.

He added that the dispute over how the bill was passed was not important for the electorate. “What is of interest to the electorate is do we need a law or don’t we need a law on immigration and the Bundesrat has said we do.”

The vote is only a partial victory for Schroeder. Since the immigration bill narrowly passed the lower house, the ‘Bundestag’, last month, it has had to be watered down. The age of family reunion has been lowered from 16 to 12, in order to get the opposition CDU-ruled states behind it in the Bundesrat.

Schroeder said he had no more room for manoeuvre in diluting the bill without incurring the wrath of the government’s junior coalition partner the Green party, which regards immigration as a major plank of its own policies.

The immigration bill had become all the more controversial in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington changing the climate in Germany regarding settlement from non-EU countries.

The CDU-CSU opposition has been insisting that the entire bill be renegotiated given the altered international climate.

Political commentators said the CDU-CSU strategy was to set the demands so high regarding the bill, that the Greens would not be in a position to accept them and would have no alterative to an open split in the ruling coalition just six months before a national election.

Opinion polls in the run up to Friday’s Bundesrat vote consistently showed that more than three quarters of those polled felt the opposition CDU-CSU demands over immigration had to do with the election campaign rather than immigration as such.

The Christian Democrats and the Christian Social Union for their part have repeatedly pointed to surveys showing that three quarters of Germans were opposed to a controlled system of immigration.

They insisted that their opposition to the bill was based on support of the “silent majority”. The proposed legislation is however backed by big business, the CDU and CSU parties’ natural constituency.

Manfred Stolpe, Social Democrat premier of Brandenburg who cast the state’s controversial “yes” vote in defiance of his coalition partner CDU interior minister Joerg Schoenbohm, said: “I am unhappy that the debate on this important future issue, regulating immigration, takes place in the middle of an election campaign.”

Stolpe took the blame for triggering a political crisis in Brandenburg State by casting the “yes” vote. A “no” vote would have sent the bill back to the parliamentary committee with the prospect of months of further wrangling.

“We cannot allow ourselves another year of bickering on this subject, providing fertile ground for xenophobia,” he said. But Friday’s fiasco was a clear indication that immigration had already become an election issue, political commentators said.