Germany, year 2020. The tension between asylum right, border control, and economy, through the imperative of deservingness

Abstract

This article discusses the new asylum laws implemented in Germany from 2015 to 2020 and places them in the wider context of the bordering process developed in Europe to control migrants’ mobility since the year 2011. ‘Asylum packages’ and the Integration Act combine a restriction of asylum rights with measures to quickly channel refugees into the German labor market. Focusing on a specific regulation that aims at integrated rejected asylum-seekers through vocational training programs—the Ausbildungsduldung—this article highlights the contradictions from the attempts to meet the German economic needs and the efforts to enforce migration control. Moreover, this work highlights how the moral economy of deservingness, which underpins the practices of confinement and selection of the migrant population, influences the new laws. Ultimately, the asylum realm is deprived of being the source of the right to stay, whose conditionality became anchored to the needs of the German economy.