Saxony’s Interior Minister, Armin Schuster (CDU), has advocated for removing the fundamental right to asylum from Germany’s Basic Law. This stance stems from a proposed Four-Point Plan aimed at significantly tightening asylum regulations, which was reported by the “Leipziger Volkszeitung” and the “Sächsische Zeitung”.
According to Schuster, the scope of asylum granted in Germany should be measured by the capacity of towns and cities to receive applicants. Instead of focusing on individual asylum claims, the government should operate on annual quotas. The CDU politician stressed that by implementing a flexible upper limit, “we must avoid the overwhelming burden of migration, as seen in the last ten years.”
Schuster intends to use these proposals to initiate a new national debate on immigration over the coming weeks, consulting both the Federal Interior Ministry and state ministers. He views the current decrease in asylum applications as validation of his earlier demands. The Saxon minister asserted that the clear course of the Federal Government has now definitively proven that “strict border controls and rejections can lead to a significant reduction in asylum intake and thus achieve a real turning point in migration.”
In fact, the number of initial asylum applications in Saxony has dropped sharply; access rates have decreased by two-thirds compared to 2024. Schuster stated that continuing border controls is “essential if we do not carelessly jeopardize the successes of the new migration policy.”
The Four-Point Plan also includes provisions for mandatory detention. Specifically, it proposes that rejected asylum applicants who fail to meet their obligations could be detained to enforce voluntary departure. Fulfilling this measure would require corresponding amendments to foreign law.
Furthermore, Schuster calls for a loosening of the European Convention on Human Rights to ensure that criminals lose their protective status. The plan also mandates stricter conditions for naturalization. Rejecting the concept of “turbo-naturalization,” Schuster stated that “the possibilities for rapid naturalization should be completely withdrawn so that integration takes precedence over the act of obtaining citizenship.”
