Citizenship and Immigration committee  Actually, I wouldn't describe it as a group inadmissibility. It's always an individual inadmissibility. So we have for certain countries a greater security concern, but we check every individual's application on its own merit, and therefore there are no refusals on group consider

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There is a general health check of the overall condition of the person concerned. To give you a number, we are in the very initial phase of the permanent resettlement program, and this concerns only 300 people a year. This is just a very early stage, and I don't think it is worth

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for the question. For the time being we have only the classical way of determining whether a person has overstayed his or her visa, and that is a stamp in the passport, which allows us to actually control, if the passport is available, whether the person is overstayin

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Illegal immigration is of major concern in Germany and in all European countries. Therefore we do of course try to send people back to their countries of origin--or, if possible, to the country of transit if readmission agreements are in force. Therefore there is a common effort,

Citizenship and Immigration committee  They are not allowed to work within the first year of their presence in Germany.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Sure. There's full accommodation for these persons. They get food. They get a certain minor allowance.The costs of living are fully covered by the authorities.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  For children, it's the same as I just said. They are part of the normal process, of course. These are vulnerable persons. Therefore, there's special attention given to the specific needs of children, but there is no different policy with regard to detention.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. We introduced this in the early 1990s, well after the collapse of the eastern bloc. We had, in 1993, 450,000 asylum seekers a year. Therefore, the constitutional right to asylum needed to be adjusted. Parallel to the Geneva Convention, we have the constitutional right, and w

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There is no general assessment that the Roma are refugees. It is an individual assessment and has nothing to do with the ethnic background of a person. So if they are Roma and apply for asylum, they go through the procedure and are evaluated on individual grounds. There is no gen

Citizenship and Immigration committee  If there are indications that a person carries a disease, there is the possibility of refusing entry and residence, of course, but that is not part of the normal scheme on long-term residence here in Germany. There will be a little change with regard to a very small group of re

Citizenship and Immigration committee  What do you mean by pre-screening in this context?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The issuance of the passports follows the registration in the public registry of each municipality. There are clear identity checks before issuance of the electronic passport. It's part of the whole issuance process that there are identity checks before the electronic passport is

Citizenship and Immigration committee  You are now mentioning another subject, which is the use of biometric information in the entry and exit system of Germany. I assume you're fully aware that we live in a hybrid system, so to speak. We have a European system of security. There are European systems of immigration an

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Actually, we do not have mandatory detention of asylum seekers. We have a different system. Persons apply for asylum, and then they are attributed to particular federal states. We have a federal country. They are attributed to a specific federal state. Within this federal state

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. We have already had two generations of documents with biometric identifiers. On the one hand, this is the electronic passport for German citizens, and this has been introduced, as you just mentioned. In addition, at the end of last year we also introduced, following