One of the reasons for this decrease is that in so-called uncomplicated cases, the police have stopped resorting to arrests, leaving illegal migrants at liberty until their deportation.
This new strategy in immigration policy, adopted by the capital's House of Representatives in September 2001, the city police began to implement in practice as early as March 2002. Before releasing an "exposed" illegal alien, local police officers, in accordance with existing regulations, conduct a check of the detained person's reliability, trying to determine whether the person awaiting expulsion might try to evade and hide from internal affairs bodies somewhere else in the country.
Despite this leniency towards illegal immigrants, Senator Kerting does not intend to compromise his political principles and does not plan to abandon deportations of asylum seekers who have been denied asylum. Persons without legal grounds for staying in the country will, as before, be sent back to their homeland. A lenient attitude of the authorities towards illegal immigrants could otherwise lead to a massive influx into Berlin of foreign citizens who entered Germany by deceptive means and hope to legalize their stay here. Excessive softness is too frivolous and ill-considered a step, because it is fraught with a complete catastrophe for the city budget, namely its social budget line. Moreover, Berlin, with its high unemployment rate, cannot provide necessary jobs even for the country's citizens, let alone foreigners.
As the DDP news service reports, the Refugee Council has on the whole given a positive assessment of the Berlin Senate's policy towards refugees over the past year. According to asylum seeker consultant Georg Klassen, the possibility of placing refugees not in reception-distribution centers but in apartments specially rented for these purposes is a major positive shift in the city's immigration policy, as it allows people awaiting authorities' decisions on their future fate to lead a more independent and self-sufficient life than before.