Germany should consider a temporary migration “pause”, a senior opposition MP has said, as Berlin faces mounting pressure to reform its immigration policies.

Jens Spahn, the former German health minister who launched a failed bid to lead the centre-Right CDU party, said the government’s targets on tackling migration were too weak.

Mr Spahn called for a “several year pause in regular migration” in an interview with Bild, a German tabloid, and said on the specific issue of illegal migration the new target should be “zero”.

“We have irregular migration in large numbers, above all of young men: 18-to-40 year-old men are the majority of those who come to us,” he told Bild. “There was once a goal of getting under 200,000 per year in the grand coalition. We succeeded in doing that too. Then, in 2000 and 2021, the numbers fell accordingly.”

He added: “But you know, the goal of irregular migration must be zero. Also it’s irregular, illegal, not legal. And the goal of things that are not lawful is, in my view, zero.”

Germany has struggled with rising levels of what it calls irregular migration for years. Recent figures show the biggest surge in illegal migration levels since 2016. Mr Spahn said the country has received 3.8 million asylum applications in the past decade.

Pausing migration levels for several years would give those already in the country time to learn German and integrate with society, Mr Spahn added.

Data released by German police in October showed that 21,000 people entered Germany via “unauthorised entries”, such as land border crossings, in the previous month. The government responded by imposing additional checks at Germany’s land borders.

The significantly increased levels of migration has been a gift to the far-Right AfD party, which has been surging in the polls on the back of campaigns for tougher migration controls.

An ongoing survey of German opinion polls by Politico, a news website, puts the AfD in second place nationally with a projected vote share of 19 per cent.

The opposition CDU party, led by Friedrich Merz who succeeded Angela Merkel, leads with 30 per cent of the vote. The SPD party led by Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, is third on 15 per cent.

Also on Monday, tensions continued to simmer between the Scholz government and the CDU over the former’s refusal so far to provide Ukraine with powerful Taurus missiles.

Mr Merz accused Mr Scholz of “playing into [Vladimir] Putin’s hands” by having constant public arguments about sending Taurus missiles to Kyiv, which the chancellor has firmly ruled out.

“We are the only country in the entire Western world that publicly discusses arms deliveries in this way ... constant public discussions and arguments in the coalition, in security terms, only play into Putin’s hand,” Mr Merz said.