As Deutsche Welle reports, one opposition politician even called the foreign minister "the country's chief pimp." The most emotional argument in this heated discussion is the fate of poor girls whom criminal gangs lured to the West with false promises and then forced into prostitution. In connection with human trafficking, the German embassy in Kiev is most often mentioned.
The second person in the German Foreign Ministry, Ludger Volmer, has already resigned. Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer himself particularly emphasizes that all relaxations of the visa regime were lifted as early as last year. Now a special commission of the Bundestag is even investigating the so-called visa scandal. Sooner or later, the minister will also have to answer to the deputies.
The German police confirm that it was in the period from 2000 to 2004 that the influx of illegal workers with legal tourist visas, as well as criminal elements from Eastern European countries, into Germany intensified. The priestesses of love from Thailand and Brazil were replaced by Ukrainian, Russian and Moldovan women. Police departments and interior ministers of the federal states repeatedly pointed out to the leadership of the Foreign Ministry the obvious abuses of the visa regime. They received no intelligible response.
Meanwhile, any Ukrainian, Russian or Moldovan who has at least once tried to obtain a visa on his own at a local German consulate can tell a sad story about how many days, or even weeks, this exhausting procedure takes. At the same time, newspapers in Kiev, Moscow or Chisinau are full of advertisements from dubious firms offering to arrange a visa almost overnight without any red tape. And they do arrange them, only prices vary depending on geography.
But for criminals and human traffickers, price is not particularly important. Therefore, their documents are always in perfect order. Is the Foreign Ministry to blame for the fact that various semi-criminal structures have emerged and are thriving around the consular departments of German embassies in various countries? Let us hope that the parliamentary commission will now find this out.
Every state has the full right to protect its borders from unwanted visitors. The opposition in the country has not only the right but also the duty to mercilessly criticize the government for lack of professionalism, for deliberate misdeeds and bureaucratic blunders. The opposition's attempt to score points on the government's miscalculations is quite legitimate. Only don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
What is the result? If you break through the thicket of bureaucratic instructions and regulations, the meaning of the former visa relaxations boiled down to the following: if employees of consular departments had doubts about the true purpose of a foreign citizen's trip to Germany or his intention to return home after the visa expired, but there was no evidence of ill intent, then the visa was recommended to be issued anyway. Now the relaxations have been lifted, and everything is exactly the opposite. Scared by the scandal, officials in consular departments will check every application three and four times and, at the slightest doubt, refuse a visa.
There is a danger that thousands of people standing in line at the visa windows of German embassies in Eastern European countries will have to pay for the domestic inter-party battles in Germany. They want to see relatives and friends in Germany. They just want to see Heidelberg or Baden-Baden, Munich or Berlin. These cities are really worth seeing. So is it permissible to humiliate Ukrainians, Russians, Kazakhs or Moldovans with suspicions of criminal intent?
Germany is a liberal, democratic country in the very heart of Europe. It simply cannot survive without the free movement of goods, capital, people and ideas. Germans themselves often and with pleasure travel without any visas throughout the European Union and to many other countries of the world. In developed states, freedom of movement has long been taken for granted. And if someone abuses this freedom – well, these are the inevitable costs of globalization. They must be fought, but one cannot fence oneself off from neighbors with a new "visa curtain."