Go! Germany Tightens Immigration
Sometimes ago it was Canada that was calling on the US embassy in Nigeria to toughen its visa rules to prevent some Nigerians from using a US visa after arriving in America to cross to Canada. Now, the Germans seem to be saying their country is too small to take more immigrants; and that some immigrants need to go.
As such, some top German officials have been calling for stricter immigration policies that would deter foreigners, non-EU citizens particularly, from accessing the country. Already, many Nigerians living in Germany have been observing some curious developments; and plans for more difficult changes any time soon which would make staying in the country far tricky and obtaining visa into Germany really onerous.
Meanwhile, nothing validates this unsettling development more than the comment made by Nigeria’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Geoffrey Onyeama, on Germany’s new repatriation process while receiving a delegation of the German government led by the security adviser to the German President, Dr. Jack Hecker.
“They don’t have enough faith and confidence in the process that we have at the moment for the repatriation process. They want to propose a completely new process of repatriation, known as Return and Readmission,” he said.
He further said that in the last two years only about 200 Nigerians had returned to the country out of about 30,000.
” Germans were not happy that the system we have in place at the moment is certainly not working to their satisfaction,” he said. According to him, the new process essentially entails that once all legal processes have been exhausted, Nigeria should trust them ( Germany), to make the right decisions on who should be repatriated.
He added that once the decision was taken, Germany would bring the affected persons to Nigeria without the involvement of Nigeria’s mission in Germany.
“They will bring them here to Nigeria and say we have gone through a process in Germany; these people are your nationals, they have exhausted all the legal processes, please take them. And it will be here on Nigeria territory that any possibility will then exist to say maybe that one is not or this one is not.
Onyeama, while describing the proposed process as a complete transformation of the current process, noted that Germany, aside from issuing travel documents to those to be repatriated, would also be responsible for their travels.