These statements are meaningless without considering who is being targeted by these rules. For context, Germany has a long-standing constitutional ban on Nazis. This isn't anything new; what is new is that one party (the AfD) is trying to find ways around the ban.
If you're arguing that the AfD aren't Nazis, I'm not sure I agree. They're already privately talking about deporting German citizens.
If you are arguing that banning a political party[0] is inherently wrong... sure. I'll agree with you, with one caveat. How do you meaningfully stop people from doing that? Just saying "Well, that would be illegal, so just disobey the illegal order" is not good enough. That's what you do for otherwise normal politicians that fuck up drafting the law[1]. But the people who are doing this shit are malicious. They need to be removed from power or they will just keep trying until they get their way. And that effectively means banning the political party trying to ban everyone else. Only a stand user can beat another stand user. Hence, the constitutional ban on Nazis.
[0] I should not have to explain to people that the Nazis banned other political parties.
[1] see also, the US 1st Amendment, which prohibits laws that restrict speech without specifying any meaningful punishment for politicians that attempt to restrict speech.
>They're already privately talking about deporting German citizens.
That's not specifically a Nazi policy.
In fact, remigration is an increasingly popular political idea in various Western countries that don't have any specific Nazi past (US, the UK, Australia, etc.)
(Remigration is also frequently done by non-Western countries as well.)
> They're already privately talking about deporting German citizens.
So is immigration policy supposed to be irreversible? One side can grant citizenship willy nilly, but undoing their actions is Nazism and illegal? Would not granting those citizenships in the first place also have been Nazism? The bar for branding someone a Nazi is low, and ~80% or more of the allied forces that fought in WWII would be Nazis under today's definition:
Citizenship has to be irreversible, or very close to it, for one simple reason: revoking citizenship is equivalent to stripping someone of their constitutionally-protected rights. Even if you have a well-defined and protected concept of free speech in the law, if the administration or government can just identify and deport people saying things they don't like, then their free speech is meaningless. Punishment and reprisal is an adequate substitute for silencing. You don't have freedoms anymore, you have franchise, a thing that can be taken away at the whim of the state[0].
Reversing a change to visa policy or not granting citizenship to migrants in the future is a different question. But it's far less problematic to not grant citizenship or visas than it is to revoke them after the fact.
As for "granting citizenship willy nilly", that wasn't done by "one side". The law is such that the choice of whether or not to admit an asylum seeker is a purely legalistic one with no political control afforded. The only thing Merkel (for better and for worse) did was smile and wave at the migrants you don't like. She had no power to stop them either. The reason why the law works this way is, again, because of WWII and Nazis. People fleeing Hitler were stopped by immigration policies at every turn. So we got every country to sign a bunch of international agreements that basically say "we will not attempt to stop people fleeing despotic regimes from entering our country".
Now, I get the feeling you want to shit on this policy, and I actually do think there's a valid critique of it. Specifically, only admitting immigrants during a time of crisis is almost guaranteed to generate resentment, both from the native-born and immigrant populations. You see, while Germany pledged to hand out passports like candy to asylum seekers, the rest of German immigration policy is rigidly inflexible and their society even more so[1].
The AfD getting banned under Germany's anti-Nazi policy is not at all unprecedented. Actually, they've had to use that same policy against the immigrants they're admitting. There's biker gangs run by Turkish immigrants that are illegal in Germany because they're too far-right. The case of Turkish immigrants to Germany is particularly illuminating. Turks in Germany have a higher rate of support for Erdogan than they do in Turkiye. Germany has managed to create a society that reliably turns poor immigrants into far-right stooges.
Do you want to know what country turns Turkish immigrants away from Islamist dictators? America.
Trump regime notwithstanding[2], the USA immigration system is unusually flexible and permissive for a rich country, and it has very generous family reunification visa programs. The family visas are, effectively, outsourcing the decision of what immigrants to admit to citizens that know the people they're sponsoring. It's an invite system. And since we've been doing this consistently for 50 years, we have immigrant communities from basically every country on the planet. So there's a very smooth gradient to integration. The "marginal cost" of an additional immigrant is basically zero. We imported the third world, but the third world became us.
> The bar for branding someone a Nazi is low, and ~80% or more of the allied forces that fought in WWII would be Nazis under today's definition:
This isn't related to the merits of the German constitutional ban on Nazis at all, but since I just spent a paragraph glazing modern American immigration policy, I feel obligated to completely dynamite America's moral foundations. I mean, even the family visas weren't intended to do what they're doing. Actually, they were created specifically to give white immigrants a fast lane through the system! The prior policy was basically "white immigrants only" and this was meant to appease people who opposed deracializing the immigration system.
To be frank, America's the country Hitler got all his worst ideas from. WWII happened right after the nadir of American race relations. The """liberal""" business establishment was planning assassinations and coups against the President. Hell, we were not that far off from joining the Axis. FDR had to bait Japan into attacking us to get the American people on board with fighting WWII. And even then he couldn't resist throwing shittons of Japanese immigrants into concentration camps in a blatant land grab.
There's a funny (in the "two nickels" sense) quirk of American history in that America will absolutely tolerate and engage in morally detestable bullshit until a war or other crisis makes it undeniably wrong. Lincoln ran on an abolitionist platform, but the actual moral opinion didn't change against slavery until Union soldiers were marching on plantations and actually seeing the horrors of slavery with their own eyes. Likewise, while we were nominally fighting an evil tyrant, that didn't hit home for a lot of soldiers until they were literally marching on Auschwitz and smelling dead bodies.
[0] The root word of "franchise" is "French", as in, the process of making one into a Frenchman. The linguistic association between France and temporary / revocable permission is because that's how freedom worked there at one point. Probably under a king named Louis.
[1] This is the same country where an announced rail detour becomes a passenger kidnapping because the driver couldn't be arsed to clear the extra stops up the chain.
[2] Part of the reason why the Trump regime is so polarizing in America is because European-style immigration enforcement is so alien to us.
> The law is such that the choice of whether or not to admit an asylum seeker is a purely legalistic one with no political control afforded.
Right, and laws are not the result of politics, but are handed to us by God on stone tablets.
Your framing is also misleading - admitting refugees [0], and granting them citizenship, are very different. Relaxing citizenship requirements to a mere 5 years of residing in Germany (or just 3 with German language proficiency) is also very much political, as was the admission of 3 million explicitly economic migrant Turks.
We're asked to believe immigration and immigration policy is something that just happens, like the tides, in response to economic and geopolitical events, and politics can do nothing about it. Meanwhile Iran has deported 1.3 million Afghans, and plans to deport 2 million more [2]. So they are "afforded political control". As is China, which, despite being a growing economy and with significantly below-replacement fertility, has a population of just 0.1% immigrants [3].
[0] I wouldn't even call them that, since they passed through many safe countries before even reaching the EU, let alone Germany.
If you're arguing that the AfD aren't Nazis, I'm not sure I agree. They're already privately talking about deporting German citizens.
If you are arguing that banning a political party[0] is inherently wrong... sure. I'll agree with you, with one caveat. How do you meaningfully stop people from doing that? Just saying "Well, that would be illegal, so just disobey the illegal order" is not good enough. That's what you do for otherwise normal politicians that fuck up drafting the law[1]. But the people who are doing this shit are malicious. They need to be removed from power or they will just keep trying until they get their way. And that effectively means banning the political party trying to ban everyone else. Only a stand user can beat another stand user. Hence, the constitutional ban on Nazis.
[0] I should not have to explain to people that the Nazis banned other political parties.
[1] see also, the US 1st Amendment, which prohibits laws that restrict speech without specifying any meaningful punishment for politicians that attempt to restrict speech.