BERLIN, March 7 (UPI) -- Germany's top security chief stepped up calls to reform the country's immigration laws to counter terrorist threats, and fight forced marriages as well as illegal immigration.
Last summer, Germany escaped a major terrorist attack when two Lebanese-born students placed a pair of homemade bombs on two regional trains in western Germany. The bombs only failed to explode because of mechanical errors. Germany's intelligence community had no idea about what had been planned.
Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, a senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives, said it was time to tighten visa procedures for foreign students.
In addition to the students themselves and their sponsors, persons who stand as guarantors for students should be checked out carefully, Schaeuble Tuesday evening told the foreign press corps in Berlin.
"So far, we didn't check the guarantors, but we found out later that the student's guarantor had once before supported a terror suspect," he said. "We have to draw the necessary consequences."
Although there were no evidence of concrete threats, Germany still was in the gridlock of global terrorism, Schaeuble added.
Sixty-four-year-old Schaeuble, who is paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair ever since a man shot at him three times in 1990, is seen as a hardliner when it comes to anti-terror measures. In the past, he has advocated for the German army to be deployed domestically in case of terror attacks, a move the German constitution still forbids. He also pushed through the creation of the anti-terror file, a database compiling extensive data on terror suspects that went live at the start of this year, and he has in the past said that a government should use testimonies from terror suspects in foreign countries, even if they may have been obtained through torture.
Several of Schaeuble's security advances have been stopped by the courts, such as his unsuccessful bid to give authorities the means to install Trojans onto a suspect's computer to gather information.
The tightening of visa procedures is only one aspect of a larger reform of Germany's immigration laws that Schaeuble and his government colleagues are currently working on.
Berlin has to write into German law 11 European Union directives and has thus decided to reassess the immigration laws adopted by the previous government.
So far, the main point of contention is how to deal with the roughly 190,000 illegal immigrants whose presence has been tolerated up to now; a possible compromise is that they will get a residence permit if they have lived in Germany for more than six years (eight years without children) and if they can prove that they can finance themselves. Schaeuble said he was optimistic that a "good solution" will be found soon.
If a legal immigrant marries a woman from abroad, she is entitled to join her husband in Germany, a rule that is often misused, observers say.
Of the people living in Germany with an immigrant background (some of them in Germany since several generations), "up to 50 percent marry people from abroad," Schaeuble said, adding that this sometimes stood in the way of successful integration. "We have the suspicion that young girls don't come to Germany because of love but because of arrangements."
Schaeuble thus wants to set a minimum age for those coming to Germany to 18 years to avoid forced marriages. In addition, to improve their chances to become integrated, he advocates requiring wives or husbands joining their immigrant spouses in Germany to demonstrate basic German language skills, a move that has sparked much controversy with the country's Turkish community.
Schaeuble said these skills could be acquired through language courses organized by the German cultural Goethe Institute in Turkey, or by video courses, citing a successful similar program launched by the Netherlands. The video could also feature the basic values and rules that should be accepted when living in Germany, he said.
