Immigration security

 

From open door to eviction: Five years ago, Angela Merkel threw open Germany's borders to more than a million migrants. Today, writes SUE REID, they're being deported in their thousands - or fleeing overt racism, many for Britain

As the world watched in awe five years ago, new faces were welcomed into Germany with balloons and banners proclaiming 'We love refugees'.

More than a million strangers headed there from faraway lands at the height of Europe's biggest migration crisis since World War II hoping for a new life in the West.

In a rallying cry to her nation, the German chancellor Angela Merkel declared in the autumn of 2015: 'We can do this. We are strong and can manage it.'

Even as Mrs Merkel's historic speech was broadcast on German TV, reports flashed up on the screen that trainloads of men, women and children were clamouring to be let in at her borders. And they were.

In astonishing scenes a few days later, thousands of bedraggled, tired migrants turned up at railway stations in German cities to be met by local children blowing soap bubbles and handing over teddy bears as the country threw off its dark, xenophobic past to become the humanitarian face of Europe.

But today the celebrations for migrants are over in this powerhouse of the European Union. 

Many of the foreigners who entered Germany in those heady days are being forcibly sent home to Africa, south Asia, the Middle East, Russia and the Balkans on secret flights, marshalled by security officers, after being frogmarched to airports from their beds by armed police.