SPD on migration and integration

The SPD wants to make Rhineland-Palatinate more attractive to foreign skilled workers and relies on fast procedures with clear standards. The central immigration office for skilled workers is to become a digital service agency, and job-related language training is to be expanded.

The SPD wants to attract more skilled workers from abroad. Procedures should be faster. One office should offer everything digitally and in one place. There should be more language courses for work.

People who want to work in the state should quickly learn which steps are still needed to have their qualification recognized, and companies should be able to plan better. The Zentrale Ausländerbehörde für Fachkräfteeinwanderung (ZABH), centralized in 2021, is to serve small businesses in particular. Recognition offices are to be digitized further and the IQ funding program strengthened. Refugees are included as a source of skilled labor, and discrimination is to be reduced. The SPD expects the federal government to fund the language courses reliably.

The SPD wants to organize returns more centrally to relieve municipalities and to deport people who are required to leave but do not go voluntarily. Immigration and naturalization offices are to recruit more staff, and asylum cases are to be decided quickly.

The SPD wants faster asylum procedures. The offices should get more staff. The state should handle more deportations itself. People who do not leave on their own should be deported. This applies above all to criminals.

Immigration and naturalization offices are to get help in finding qualified staff. Case registration in reception facilities is to be digital and efficient. The state's courts, which the platform describes as a nationwide model for fast rulings in asylum disputes, are to become even faster. Returns are to be centralized more strongly and, according to the platform, carried out humanely and consistently. For the most serious offenders, the SPD considers detention pending deportation and administrative detention necessary in individual cases.

The SPD wants to ease the path to a German passport for people who have lived in the state for many years. Naturalization procedures are to become fully digital and thus faster and more transparent.

Some people have lived in Rhineland-Palatinate for a long time. The SPD wants to make naturalization easier for them. Naturalization means getting German citizenship. Applications should be digital and faster.

Fully digital processes are meant to make procedures quicker and more reliable for both office staff and applicants. The SPD also wants to strengthen easily accessible advice for people interested in naturalization. Municipalities are to keep being supported as partners of the state in reception and integration.

The SPD wants to support immigrants in learning German from the start and get them into work quickly. At the same time, skilled workers from abroad are to gain easier access to the labor market.

The SPD wants immigrants to learn German quickly. There will be language courses from daycare to adult education. People should find work fast. Companies get help when they look for skilled workers from abroad.

Language courses are to be funded across all stages of education, including with childcare, and linked with civic education. Interpreting services will be expanded further, and teaching in 20 heritage languages is to be secured. For entering work, the platform lists help with completing school diplomas, job-related language courses, quick recognition of foreign qualifications and further training. The central immigration office for skilled workers in Kaiserslautern is to be strengthened. The SPD wants to expand psychosocial care for refugees in the Psychosocial Centers.

The SPD advocates that everyone living permanently in a municipality should be allowed to vote there, even without a passport from an EU country. In the party's view, those who live somewhere permanently should help decide its future.

Today only Germans and EU citizens can vote in local elections. The SPD wants to change that. Everyone who lives there permanently should be allowed to vote. This includes people from countries outside the EU.

The demand concerns elections at the municipal level. The SPD also values the advisory councils for migration and integration as a contribution to local integration. It supports projects such as the coordination office "Aktiv für Flüchtlinge" (Active for Refugees) and the work of the state commissioner for migration and integration.