Turning the Legal Into the Illegal

Christopher Nsoh had no plans to come to Germany.

When you have hours to get out of your country or face death, you don’t go through a travel agent anyway. His trip to Europe involved hiding out at a friend’s house for a week before getting a spot in the compartment of a ship heading out of Cameroon toward Germany.

More than a week later, Nsoh disembarked in Hamburg, skirted the border control and made his way to Düsseldorf. There, he applied for asylum.

That was five years ago.

During that time, the political activist was forced to live in an asylum home near Berlin, buy food using the German equivalent of food stamps at a special market and, worst of all, wasn’t allowed to work, he said.

"I felt myself deteriorating," said Nsoh, 33, who was a lawyer specializing in international law in Cameroon.

Fates like Nsoh’s will hopefully be avoided in the future, if the immigration law passed by Germany’s upper legislative chamber, the Bundesrat, ever becomes law. German President Johannes Rau signed the bill into law on Thursday, but its future remains uncertain.

The conservative opposition to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s government on Thursday filed suit against the passage of the law in Constitutional Court. The Christian Democratic Union says the way in which the law passed upper parliament is unconstitutional.

Will asylum-seekers be left in the cold?

While politicians and lawyers battle over details of what many call a progressive new German immigration law, Nsoh is convinced the law hasn’t done enough to protect asylum seekers like himself.

The new law seeks to bring in highly-qualified immigrants to come to Germany by doing away with a lot of the bureaucratic red tape that kept them from staying here. In trimming down the Byzantine process, the law also promises to speed up the decisions on asylum cases like Nsoh’s, who is still waiting for a government verdict on his application.

In a policy that mirrors the tough talk on asylum seekers and illegal immigrants currently taking place in Denmark, Italy and Britain, the new law also aims to deport those rejected for asylum in a quicker manner. Especially affected are around 250,000 asylum applicants currently "tolerated" by the German government, according to the German lobby group Pro Asyl.

Pushing them into the underground

Faced with possibility of forced stay in one of the newly-created deportation centers or diving into the underground, advocates fear many will choose the latter.

"People who’s lives are threatened will not be able to exploit this law that gives them the right to seek asylum," said Nsoh, who is active in the Brandenburg Refugee Initiative. "I think the Europeans, and the Germans in particular, should be careful with such a law, because it’s going to portray how discriminative and racist Germany and Europe is becoming."

The fiery words are one side of the furious debate taking place at a European Summit in Seville, Spain this weekend. The other side are countries such as the Netherlands, England and Germany, who favor tightening the borders to stop the flow of immigrants, both legal and illegal streaming into their countries.

Politicians in those countries are feeling the heat of voters flabbergasted that their governments would take on more immigrants in times of high unemployment and overburdened social welfare budgets.

"You see a competition of restrictions for refugees," said Bernd Mesovic, of Pro Asyl. "It’s difficult to see what European country is in front at the moment and which is behind."

At the Seville summit, European leaders are expected to talk about better cooperation among law enforcement at the borders and in exchanging Visa information.

A Europe-wide asylum policy, proposed at a summit in Tampere, Finland in 1999, will be presented in modified form, but experts say there is likely to be little agreement on it. In areas like illegal immigration, the EU’s member states still prefer to go their own way.

That means a tougher journey for people like Nsoh and one more and more likely to be undertaken illegally.

"We were more optimistic of the refugee issue over the past years," said Mesovic. "But what the European countries and governments have done, especially after the 11th of September is a kind of sabotage. They ... put the strees on a policy of a fight against immigration."