German media has admitted that a new policy to ban knives, pushed by Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, is due to the large number of migrants stabbing people across the European Union (EU) country. The newspaper Die Welt published an editorial calling on Minister Faeser to address the real issue behind rising knife crime: Germany’s lax asylum policies.
Die Welt notes that knife attacks now take place in major German cities nearly every weekend and adds that the majority of knife attacks are by migrants from countries like Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Faeseer announced that the government would like to restrict the length of knives citizens can carry in public from 12 cm (~4.7 inches) to 6 cm (~2.4 inches).
German police statistics show that last year, there were 8,951 cases of knife attacks across the country, with the trend increasing this year. Railway stations are hotspot areas for knife crime, as areas where migrants tend to gather.
Germany‘s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) released data earlier this year showing that migrants in Germany are behind as much as 58.5 percent of all violent crimes in the country.
In 2023 alone, there were 923,000 foreign criminal suspects in various crimes, and 41 percent of all criminal suspects were foreign-born despite being a much smaller percentage of the overall German population.
It is likely a significant portion of the remaining crimes are committed by poorly integrated German citizens whose parents or grandparents are migrants.
The surge in migrant crime, along with other changes as a result of mass migration, led Hungary‘s Prime Minister Viktor Orban to comment in June that Germany is no longer the same country it was even a decade ago.