German chancellor Olaf Scholz has said that asylum seekers arriving from another country will only be entitled to “bed, bread, and soap”.
The major change means that migrants who arrive via a different European Union country will be denied benefits.
Scholz has demanded that they claim asylum in the first member state they reach, announcing the policy after a Syrian asylum seeker killed three people with a kitchen knife at a street festival in Solingen last week.
The suspect arrived in Germany in 2022 after being registered in Bulgaria and had been on a deportation list for over a year.
Mr Scholz said: “After the terrorist attack in Solingen, we are determined to draw the necessary conclusions – deportations will be made easier, the authorities will be strengthened in the fight against violent Islamism and gun laws will be further tightened.”
Many migrants continue on to Germany after arriving on the Mediterranean coast, despite the Dublin rules prohibiting them from doing so.
The Dublin Regulation is a set of rules that determine which EU country is responsible for processing an asylum application.
The rules aim to prevent asylum seekers from submitting applications in multiple countries, and to reduce the number of people who are moved between countries.
A key aspect of it is that the country where an asylum seeker first applies for asylum is responsible for processing the application.
But for the past decade, Berlin has largely ignored the Dublin regulation and allowed migrants to file a second asylum application in Germany.
This is because when Berlin has tried to enforce the rules, it has been impeded by the German courts. German courts have previously ruled that countries such as Greece fail to meet the EU’s basic requirements for migrant care.
Meanwhile, Germany may be edging closer to reintroducing controls on all its borders in a move which potentially could spell the end of free movement in Europe as enshrined by the Schengen Agreement.
Berlin reimposed temporary border checks with all its neighbouring countries during this summer’s European football Championships, which the country hosted.
The government is now coming under intense pressure to maintain universal border checks from one of its fiercest political rivals.
In an opinion piece for Bild, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Friedrich Merz, and Markus Söder from the CDU’s Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) ratcheted up the pressure on Scholz over immigration.
They wrote: “The controls at all German state borders must be continued.”