BERLIN (AP) – German lawmakers on Friday approved a bill that would ease rules on citizenship and remove restrictions on holding dual citizenship. The government claims the plan will facilitate immigrant integration and help attract skilled workers.
Parliament voted 382 to 234 in favor of the plan proposed by the social-liberal coalition led by centre-left Prime Minister Olaf Scholz, with 23 members abstaining. The main centre-right opposition coalition slammed the plan, claiming it would make German citizenship cheap.
The law would make people eligible for citizenship after five years in Germany, or three years in the case of “special integration results”, instead of the current eight or six years. Children born in Germany will automatically become citizens if one of their parents has been a legal resident for five years, up from the current eight years.
Restrictions on holding dual citizenship will also be abolished. Currently, most people from countries other than European Union member states and Switzerland must renounce their previous nationality when acquiring German citizenship, although there are some exceptions.
According to the government, 14% of the population (more than 12 million out of a population of 84.4 million) do not have German nationality, and of these, around 5.3 million have lived in Germany for at least 10 years. According to the study, Germany's naturalization rate is well below the EU average.
Approximately 168,500 people will acquire German citizenship in 2022. The figure was the highest since 2002 and was driven by a significant increase in the number of naturalized Syrian nationals arriving over the past decade, although long-term residents still made up only a small proportion.
Germany opens borders, net immigration reaches record high of 1.5 millionhttps://t.co/Wx8gz7ZWkP
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) June 28, 2023
Interior Minister Nancy Feser said the reforms would bring Germany in line with European neighbors such as France, and pointed to the need to attract more skilled workers. “We have to make offers to qualified people from all over the world, including the acquisition of German citizenship, just like in the United States and Canada,” he told reporters ahead of the vote.
This law stipulates that naturalized persons must be able to support themselves and their relatives, but until 1974, those who came to West Germany as “guest workers” or who moved to communist East Germany to work There are exceptions for those who come.
Current law requires would-be citizens to abide by the “fundamental orders of a free democracy,” and the new law says anti-Semitic and racist acts are incompatible with this.
In a video message, Scholz said that amid growing concerns about the far-right's intentions toward immigration, “we want to say this to all those who have lived, worked and obeyed the laws in Germany for decades: You are a German. You belong to Germany.'' ”
The reforms mean no one will have to “deny their roots”, he added.
Conservative opposition parties argued that Germany was relaxing citizenship requirements just as other countries were tightening them.
“This is not a citizenship modernization bill. This is a citizenship devaluation bill,” Alexander Slom of the center-right Christian Democratic Party told lawmakers.
He says that people who have been in Germany for five or three years have not yet set down roots in the country. He argued that removing restrictions on dual citizenship would “bring political conflicts from abroad into our politics.”
The overhaul of citizenship law is one of a series of social reforms that Scholz's three-party coalition has agreed to implement when it takes office at the end of 2021. It also includes plans to liberalize rules around marijuana possession and sale, making it easier to access. Transgender, intersex and non-binary people must change their gender and name on public registers. Both still require parliamentary approval.
In recent months, the government, which has become deeply unpopular as a result of protracted infighting, an economic downturn and, more recently, a homegrown fiscal crisis that has led to spending and subsidy cuts, has sought to prevent asylum seekers from emigrating. I am striving to do so. political issues.
The citizenship reform was passed a day after lawmakers approved a bill aimed at easing deportation for unsuccessful asylum seekers.
More than one in four people in Germany have an “immigration background”https://t.co/vGX6i7vor5
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) April 14, 2022
