While Germany’s next government is being forged in coalition talks between Friedrich Merz’s center-right CDU and its likely partner, the center-left SPD, the country’s top immigration official has this week dropped a bombshell. Hans-Eckhard Sommer, head of BAMF, the federal office for migration and refugees has called publicly for a complete overhaul of the German asylum system.

Speaking as a “private citizen” at the CDU-adjacent Konrad Adenauer Foundation think tank — itself an extraordinary move for a German civil servant — Sommer said migrants should no longer be able to apply for asylum or refugee status at the country’s land borders. This would effectively end the practice of migrants arriving without papers and applying for protection by uttering the word “asylum”. Under current rules, migrants who do so are provided with housing and welfare services while their cases are reviewed. This can mean years in limbo, beneficial neither for the migrant nor the state. “The current system is irresponsible towards those seeking protection and towards our own population,” Sommer said. “Internal security and social cohesion are being put at risk.”

Aside from the horrific, attention-grabbing attacks on innocent people by asylum-seekers and refugees in recent years, mass immigration is also weighing heavily on public services. Housing, health services, schools, social services are under severe strain while integration workers and language courses are few and far between.

The right to asylum was included in the West German constitution largely out of atonement, with an eye on the millions of people displaced by the rise of Nazism and the Second World War. But a growing number of moderate politicians say it’s no longer fit for purpose, such as centrist CDU MP Serap Güler, the daughter of Turkish “guest workers”. According to Güler, Turkish immigrants of the older generation had to work hard when they arrived in Germany, but now “so many people who, without being asked to do anything in return, are getting so much”. Güler, echoing Sommer and Chancellor-in-waiting Merz, is calling for asylum seekers to be turned back at the border.

That is, of course, easier said than done. Germany borders nine countries, none of them keen on dealing with migrants that it turns down. Besides, tight controls on 2,300 miles of borders are illusory within the European trade bloc which is so vital to the German economy. Any checks would severely disrupt the flow of goods and require at least 10,000 new border officers, according to police union GdP.

So, in reality, asylum reform is unthinkable without EU-wide reform. The New Pact on Migration and Asylum is scheduled to go into effect in 2026, and will supposedly bring down the number of migrants settling in the EU. Under the plan, undocumented migrants arriving at Europe’s outer borders will be processed within a few weeks, thanks to new digitized procedures. Asylum decisions will be fast tracked and rejected applicants speedily deported. Sommer is skeptical about the feasibility of the scheme. “Why should states with external borders keep to the new rules,” he asked, “since they didn’t keep to the old ones either?” The EU has also announced plans to increase the number of officers in its border force Frontex.

Sommer says upper limits, which aren’t explicitly named in the pact, are necessary, but this would require amendments to the Geneva Convention, European treaties and the German constitution. Asked whether such radical changes would be inhumane, Sommer responded: “We bask in the fact that we help everyone, and we simply accept the inhumanity of this path.” In other words, the current system results in egregious failure to uphold human rights in that it creates incentives for unscrupulous people smugglers and uncertain conditions for migrants languishing in refugee centers.

Will the incoming coalition listen to voices like Sommer, who warns that “responsible politics senses when the tipping point has been reached?” Do Merz and his future junior partner, the SPD, possess the political energy to fashion a Migrationswende?

Alongside the war in Ukraine and rebooting the military, jumpstarting the stagnant economy and responding to Donald Trump’s trade war, immigration reform is just one of the mammoth tasks facing Germany. Not since after the Second World War has an incoming German government had so many pressing tasks on its to-do list. In the latest polls, support for the CDU has fallen to 25%, down from 28.5% in February’s election. At 24%, the anti-immigration AfD is nipping at Merz’s heels.

Already, it seems, voters are getting impatient.

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Maurice Frank co-founded the English magazine Exberliner and now co-writes the newsletter Update Germany.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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