GERMANY’S DEBATE over migration sometimes seems divorced from reality. The country’s low birth rate and shrinking workforce imply a pressing need to import manpower. Much political talk, however, is concerned with how to keep immigrants away. The anti-immigration right is surging in opinion polls, and even otherwise liberal folk are increasingly prone to saying that “certain kinds” of immigrants are alien to the national Leitkultur, a fuzzy concept of Germanness.

Yet the past week has seen a turn. Earlier this month German media exposed the proceedings of a private conclave of hard-right politicians at a posh hotel near Berlin in November, where the participants discussed expelling millions of aliens. That scandal woke up the dormant left, which has organised a series of big “anti-fascist” demonstrations in cities across the country. On January 20th some 250,000 Germans took to the streets in one of their biggest mass protests this century.

Meanwhile, the governing centre-left coalition, made up of the Social Democrats, the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats, has injected some good sense into the immigration debate. On January 18th and 19th it passed two immigration bills in the Bundestag. The first, pleasing to conservatives, will make it easier to expel asylum-seekers with dubious cases, whose numbers have soared since the end of the pandemic. The second, more significant law will make it easier for legitimate immigrants to gain German nationality.

The reasons for the latter law are obvious, though German media has devoted strangely little space to discussing them. An extraordinary 13.4m of Germany’s 84m residents do not hold citizenship. More than 5m of these have lived in the country longer than ten years. In some cities the proportion is far higher: 45% of the population of Offenbach, a big satellite of Frankfurt, are foreigners, as well as a third of Munich’s and a quarter of Berlin’s. This number has swollen rapidly in the past decade, partly because more immigrants have arrived, but also because Germany has failed to naturalise those already here.

Germany’s “naturalisation rate”—the percentage of resident foreigners granted nationality every year—was just 1.2% in 2021, well behind the European average of 2.2%. Sweden did far better at 10%. The number Germany naturalised rose from 130,000 in 2021 to 168,000 in 2022, the highest in two decades. But the backlog still grew, because of a range of obstacles: restrictions on dual nationality, long residency requirements, tough tests to prove language skills and gainful employment, and a clogged bureaucracy.

On average, Turkish immigrants who acquire German citizenship have already been in the country for 24 years. Small wonder that nearly half of Germany’s 3m immigrants of Turkish background—the largest immigrant group—remain non-citizens. Their case is special. Among the hundreds of thousands of Turkish Gastarbeiter (guest workers) who arrived in the 1960s and 1970s, many assumed they would return to Turkey and so did not apply to become German. Yet with hard-right pundits wagging fingers at the alleged failure of Turkish immigrants to integrate, Germany’s failure to welcome them deserved scrutiny too.

The new law should help address the citizenship backlog. It shortens the residency requirement for most applicants from eight to five years, which is in line with other countries that compete with Germany to attract talent, such as France and America. In special cases the wait can now be as short as three years. Children who are born in Germany with at least one parent who has lived in Germany for five years will automatically become citizens. Dual citizenship is now generally allowed. New citizens will have to promise to uphold democratic freedoms and to accept Germany’s “special historical responsibility” for Nazism and the need to protect Jewish life.

Some 5m resident non-Germans are EU citizens who already enjoy nearly all the rights of natives, and so may not see the need to add another nationality. Of the remaining 8m foreigners, including around 1m Ukrainian refugees, it is unclear how many will now rush to acquire a German passport. It is also unclear how capably the understaffed and underfunded bureaucracy that handles naturalisation, much of it managed by local governments, will adapt to the new rules.

Some estimates suggest that 2m or more Germans could be added to electoral rolls in the next few years. There will probably not be enough of them to strongly affect the next national election in autumn 2025. Nevertheless, the far-right Alternative for Germany party attacked the new law as a “coup d’état through a forced restructuring of voter demographics”. Whomever newly minted Germans vote for, it is hard to argue with two points. Without immigration, Germany’s population would already be in steep decline and its economy in jeopardy. And if Germans fail to make immigrants welcome, they risk creating precisely what the hard right fears: a huge pool of disenfranchised, disgruntled aliens in their midst. ■