There is a thesis that the dragging of feet over the introduction of biometric registration, encompassing among other things the taking of fingerprints or other individual data, may be a deliberate action.
Full registration would, after all, assign a given person to a specific place in the system, which would make it impossible for the Germans to send people without documents back to neighbouring states, such as Poland or France, under the pretext of a lack of knowledge about their original place of registration.
Such a strategy allows the status of “anonymous persons” to be maintained, which in practice facilitates procedures for expulsion beyond Germany's borders without the need to take responsibility for them within the Dublin system.
One of the most striking manifestations of the new policy is the creation of a special centre on the grounds of an airport in Berlin, dedicated to persons described in German terminology as “without a chance” (German: chancenlos) and deemed to be dangerous.
It is a place of a specific rigour, where migrants are provided with only the absolute social minimum - a bed, bread and hygiene products - while at the same time being kept in full isolation from the rest of the country through a system of fences and constant camera monitoring.
This centre serves as a transit zone in which persons with a negative asylum prognosis are to remain until their almost immediate deportation.
The federal government's rhetoric surrounding these facilities rests on a peculiar legal and linguistic paradox. The minister of the interior describes the changes being introduced as a “moving locomotive”, which is meant to symbolize the dynamism and inevitability of the deportation processes.
At the same time, the ministry's official position holds that these centres are not prisons, despite the fact that a drastic restriction of personal liberty takes place in them.
This line of argument rests on the claim that these restrictions are indispensable in order to send persons who have no right to asylum back to their countries of origin effectively and swiftly.
The processes described show that Germany is striving for a logistical optimization of migration management, focusing on the elimination of mistakes of the past, when the lack of control over persons with no chance of asylum led to their disappearance within the social system.
The current measures, although limited in scale to the centre in Berlin, indicate a direction of professionalization of the deportation structures.
At the same time, the tensions along the Berlin-neighbours line, arising from the procedures of foisting off migrants without registration, are becoming an increasingly serious diplomatic problem, which exposes the gaps in the supposedly uniform EU system of migration management.
The construction of centres such as the one at the Berlin airport is a signal to public opinion of a hardening of the course, although their current throughput remains marginal in relation to the needs.
A key fact remains the strategic avoidance of full documentation of migrants, which allows for greater flexibility in measures of an extradition-related and cross-border character.
