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# Why Germans Fear for the Future
- URL: https://goodoil.news/why-germans-fear-for-the-future/
- Published: 2026-08-24T01:30:14.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-24T01:30:13.000Z
- Description: For those of us who remember a more cohesive Germany and who want our grandchildren to inherit something better than managed fragmentation, Solwyn’s diagnosis is not extreme. It is overdue.
- Author: Reproduced with permission
- Tags: World Politics, Immigration

[**Jürgen Amsinck**](https://www.freespeechbacklash.com/article/why-ordinary-germans-fear-future?ref=goodoil.news)  
*FSB*

I grew up in a West Germany that still remembered the ruins of 1945 and the hard-won stability that followed. My generation learned that borders matter, that the rule of law is not a slogan, and that a society can only absorb so much rapid change before the bonds that hold it together begin to fray. Today, when former Federal Police Captain Jan Solwyn speaks of European borders as a political and social fault line and warns that uncontrolled illegal migration has the potential to destroy the European Union and even to produce civil-war conditions in German cities, most ordinary Germans I know do not dismiss him as an alarmist. They nod. Quietly, privately, often with a sense of exhausted recognition. They agree.

Solwyn is no ideologue. He spent 15 years in the Bundespolizei, including specialised overseas deployments for Frontex and EU missions. He worked the external borders during and after the 2015–16 migrant crisis: the Greek islands, the Bulgarian frontier, the chaotic corridors that funneled hundreds of thousands northward. He has written two books rooted in that experience, *An der Grenze* and the more recent *Europa zerbricht an seinen Grenzen*, documenting what he saw: porous frontiers, overwhelmed systems, parallel worlds of official narrative and operational reality, and the cumulative strain on internal security. In his recent interview with *Die Welt*, he states the matter plainly: little of structural consequence has changed since 2015\. European asylum rules remain the core problem. If policy continues on its present course, civil-war-like conditions in major German cities are no longer unthinkable.

The background is familiar yet still under-appreciated in its scale and consequences. In 2015 and 2016, Germany received roughly 1.2 million asylum applications. Angela Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das” became both a moral declaration and a policy of open doors. Subsequent years brought lower but still substantial numbers; between 2015 and 2024 Germany registered around 2.6 million first-time asylum claims. By the mid-2020s the country hosted several million people with various forms of protection or temporary status, alongside a broader foreign-national population exceeding 14 million. Integration has succeeded for many individuals. It has failed, or barely begun, for large cohorts – particularly young men from certain cultural and regional backgrounds whose rates of labour-market participation remain low and whose involvement in crime statistics is disproportionately high.

Official figures make this uncomfortable truth difficult to ignore. Non-German nationals, roughly 15–17 per cent of the population, account for around a third or more of crime suspects in recent Police Crime Statistics (PKS). In categories of violent crime and sexual offences the over-representation is sharper still. Temporary migrants and certain national groups appear with particular frequency. These are not ‘right-wing talking points’ – they are data published by the Bundeskriminalamt. Solwyn’s operational experience matches the numbers: repeated encounters with drug dealing at stations, group violence, sexual harassment, and the practical impossibility of swift removal for many rejected claimants. Deportation remains a bureaucratic obstacle course. Countries of origin often refuse to cooperate. Legal avenues for appeal stretch for years. The result is a de-facto permanent underclass living outside the reciprocal obligations that sustain a high-trust society.

Ordinary Germans notice. They notice it in the changed character of certain urban neighbourhoods – no-go zones in all but name, where police enter only in force. They notice it in schools where teachers struggle with language barriers, cultural clashes, and rising aggression. They notice it in the strain on welfare systems, housing, and hospitals. They notice the growing presence of parallel societies in which Sharia-influenced norms, clan structures, and Islamist recruitment compete with the liberal democratic order. The 2015–16 Cologne assaults on New Year’s Eve were an early, visceral shock. Subsequent terrorist attacks like the Berlin Christmas market, Würzburg, Solingen, and others reinforced the sense that the state’s monopoly on violence was fraying at the edges. Public trust in institutions that repeatedly minimised or reframed these patterns has eroded.

Solwyn’s central claim that borders have become a fault line capable of breaking the EU rests on more than crime statistics. The European asylum system, shaped by the Dublin Regulation and successive expansions of the Common European Asylum System, creates perverse incentives. Secondary movement is routine. Once inside the Schengen area, claimants move toward the most generous welfare and labour-market conditions. Front-line states are left to manage arrivals they cannot control; destination states absorb the long-term costs. Attempts at reform, pact after pact, have produced incremental bureaucracy rather than restored sovereignty. Frontex has been expanded yet remains constrained by political directives and legal challenges. Externalisation deals with Turkey, Tunisia, or Libya prove fragile and transactional. The fundamental principle that a polity must be able to decide who enters and remains has been subordinated to a humanitarian absolutism that treats every irregular arrival as a moral test rather than a policy choice.

From a classical liberal or conservative perspective that values ordered liberty, the nation-state as the practical unit of democratic accountability, and the social trust necessary for limited government, this is not sustainable. High-trust societies with generous welfare states and dense regulatory frameworks are particularly vulnerable to large-scale inflows from low-trust, high-fertility, culturally distant regions. The fiscal costs are real. The cultural costs are harder to quantify but no less consequential: the gradual normalisation of street crime, the intimidation of women in public spaces, the rise of antisemitism in certain migrant communities, the pressure on free speech when criticism of migration policy is branded xenophobic. Libertarians who prize individual rights and free markets should be especially alert. Open borders without cultural compatibility and enforceable rules do not expand liberty; they import the conditions that make liberty harder to sustain – that is higher policing costs, lower social cohesion, and eventual demands for more state control.

Solwyn’s warning of civil-war conditions is deliberately stark. He does not predict tanks in the streets tomorrow. He describes a trajectory: continued uncontrolled inflows, persistent parallel societies, rising inter-group tension, and a political class that responds with denial or managed decline rather than restoration of control. In that environment, polarisation intensifies. Mainstream parties lose credibility. Fringe forces on both sides gain. Local flashpoints – riots, targeted violence, retaliatory vigilantism – become more frequent. History offers unhappy precedents for multiethnic societies that lose the capacity to enforce common rules. Germany’s own 20th-century experience teaches that social fracture, once advanced, is difficult to reverse without profound cost.

Most ordinary Germans I speak with are not racists. They are not indifferent to genuine refugees fleeing war or persecution. They are, however, increasingly unwilling to accept the pretence that numbers, origins, and behaviour are irrelevant. They see that selective migration of skilled, assimilable individuals can strengthen a country, while mass low-skill, culturally distant migration under broken asylum rules does the opposite. They observe that neighbouring countries which maintained firmer border controls – Denmark’s tighter policies, for example – have fared better in public confidence and social outcomes. They resent being told that noticing these patterns is itself the problem.

The UK, with its own Channel crossings and small-boat crisis, faces parallel pressures. FSB’s libertarian-conservative readership understands that sovereignty is not a dirty word. Borders are the precondition of the democratic nation-state; without them, citizenship becomes meaningless and the social contract dissolves. Solwyn’s testimony, grounded in years at the operational frontier, should be heard as a practical warning rather than moral failure. Europe still has time to recover control – through serious external border enforcement, accelerated returns, reform of asylum incentives, and honest public debate. Whether the political will exists is another question. For those of us who remember a more cohesive Germany and who want our grandchildren to inherit something better than managed fragmentation, Solwyn’s diagnosis is not extreme. It is overdue.

This article was originally published by the [Free Speech Backlash](https://www.freespeechbacklash.com/article/why-ordinary-germans-fear-future?ref=goodoil.news).