MOBILITY AND MIGRATION 475
clearly demonstrated by the attack in Solingen just a day after the Bun-
destag voted on the amendment.
By making this change to its constitution and eliminating the liberal
West German provisions for asylum, Germany moved to align itself more
closely with its European neighbors. In some countries of Europe, the
idea of a safe third country had been put in place earlier. Some of the
new regulations that were negotiated at the European level included the
clause on the fi rst country of registration that only allows asylum-seekers
to submit their petition for asylum in the fi rst safe country that they enter
within Europe. For a few years now, the countries on the Mediterranean
have become the main ports of entry for asylum migration because of
their geographic position.
The amendments to the right of asylum in West Germany were not
only part of a process of German-German reconciliation that, among oth-
ers, came about through the exclusion of non-Germans, but also were
embedded within the context of the Europeanization of migration policy.
Since the late 1970s, states across Europe had become more restrictive
in the way in which they dealt with the right of asylum. Correspondingly,
asylum policy came to be seen more as a security issue that had to be
negotiated between the ministers of the interior in the individual Euro-
pean countries.^150 This Europeanization of migration policy has therefore
transferred elements of national sovereignty to supranational actors, but
this by no means implies that we can speak of a uniform migration policy
in the EU. Europeanization has also meant that European migration pol-
icy is no longer restricted to the EU territory. Readmission agreements
such as those between the Federal Republic and Poland (before Poland
joined the EU) have brought an increasing number of European states
that are not part of the Schengen border system into the new European
migration regime. Other forms of advance border controls, some of which
are located hundreds of kilometers beyond Europe’s borders, have also
been part of this process, in ad-
dition to the shifting of borders
within countries, such as the
extraterritorial zone that has
been established at Frankfurt
Airport.^151 For these reasons as
well as others, many authors
have described the turn of the
millennium as a transition to a
new migration regime.^152 They
do not point to the isolationism
implied by the idea of the “For-
Figure 9.1. Still from Duvarlar-Mauern-
Walls (2000, dir. Can Candan)