On the border between the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg and France, German federal police apprehend individuals unauthorized to enter the country on a near-daily basis. This is how Germany describes persons eligible for expulsion — in this case, to France.
Nearly 10 people per day are expelled by Germany to France along this stretch. Switzerland faces even greater problems with Germany; this year the situation has been especially dire, as in the first nine months of the current year, German federal police expelled over 9,000 people to Switzerland. During the same period, 7,862 people were expelled to Poland and 2,350 to France.
Until recently, Austria was accepting many migrants from Germany. According to the NGO Asylum Coordination, this amounted to approximately 12,000 cases over the past three years. The majority subsequently made another attempt to get into Germany. The situation appears to be similar in Luxembourg. As local media reported, in the first days after the introduction of border controls, Germany expelled 32 people, but only two reached Luxembourg. However, the situation began to grow complicated as expulsions increased in October and November. Against this backdrop, a new dispute even erupted between Luxembourg and Germany over border controls. It concerns the alleged dumping of illegal immigrants from the neighboring country. According to federal police data, in the 46 days since the introduction of border controls on the Luxembourg-German border, there were as many as 120 expulsions. Relative to the comparatively short border, this number is proportionally high, especially in comparison with Belgium, where Germany pushed back 211 people during this period. The Luxembourg government announced that it would turn to the European Commission to verify the legality of the border controls. Cases recorded in German police chronicles resemble practices employed by German police in the case of Poland. A German police officer was quoted in a regional newspaper in Trier as saying: "We have been here on the A64 highway for two days already and have already carried out the first expulsions. We have a mandate from the federal government and that is precisely the basis on which we are working and acting. In this way we have already managed to return individuals entering illegally back to the border with Luxembourg."
After the introduction of new controls on the border between Lower Saxony and the Netherlands in September, federal police expelled 144 people to the Netherlands in the first seven weeks.
The calmest situation regarding immigrant expulsions from Germany to neighboring countries is in Denmark. The numbers there are negligible.
[Aleksandra Fedorska is a journalist for Polish and German media]
