Hans-Georg Maaßen: "Germany is more divided than ever"

It's now five years since the "Wir schaffen das" ("we can do it") slogan by Chancellor Merkel, who without a plan B, as she put it, decided to open the borders to mass migration to Germany and the European Union.

Hans-Georg Maaßen who served as President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution from 2012 to 2018 shared a different view of how Germany dealt with the refugee crisis.

"We can do it!" is an ambiguous sentence, because it is not clear what the goal is, namely what we want to "create". If that meant, we will manage to accommodate and care for all asylum seekers who come to us, to register everyone and give everyone an asylum procedure, then the goal has been achieved. We have achieved it. Many Germans had a different goal in mind: that we can take in these migrants without fundamentally changing Germany, and that their integration into our culture succeeds. This goal, if it was pursued at all, has not been achieved: five years after the start of the refugee crisis, Germany is more divided than ever because of immigration and the EU has been weakened; it has been shown that parallel societies have been strengthened through the influx of migrants, the integration of many young Muslims of Arab origin has failed and there has been an increase in Islamist attacks and crimes by migrants. It was all predictable.

Source: ntv.de