My daughter lives in Munich with her husband and child. They are German citizens, highly educated professionals building an ordinary family life in a country that is now their own. From Karachi, I have never felt a need to put an asterisk beside the word German when I think about them.
Then I saw the AfD win nearly 44 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt. My daughter does not depend on a German visa, nor does her family need an employer to preserve its right to remain in the country. She is German, and so are her husband and child. Yet the election result made me think about something a passport alone cannot explain.
Why should I feel even a trace of unease when their legal position is so secure?
The answer took me away from immigration law and toward a more difficult question. Germany can determine citizenship through legislation and protect it through its constitution. Politics can still argue over who feels German enough to belong.
A Passport Settles the Legal Question
German law gives my family a reassuring answer. Article 16 of the Basic Law says that no German may be deprived of citizenship, while loss of citizenship can occur only under law and cannot involuntarily leave a person stateless. Article 3 separately establishes equality before the law and prohibits discrimination on grounds that include origin, race and faith. (gesetze-im-internet.de)
My daughter’s position is therefore fundamentally different from mine when I travel to Germany. I arrive with a Pakistani passport and enter as a visitor. At the airport, an immigration officer can examine my documents because I am crossing into somebody else’s country; after I leave the terminal and reach my daughter’s home, I am staying with people who are already in theirs.
That difference matters more to me now than it once did. My daughter is not a Pakistani visitor whom Germany can simply order to leave because a government changes its immigration policy. German citizenship places her family inside the constitutional order, with rights that immigration legislation cannot casually take away.
Article 16 answers that legal question rather firmly. It cannot tell me what another German thinks when he hears my daughter’s name or learns that her father lives in Karachi. A constitution establishes rights; it cannot compel every citizen to understand national belonging in precisely the same way.
That is where the AfD’s rise becomes personally interesting to me.
Germany’s Immigration Argument Has Moved Beyond Immigration
The AfD’s breakthrough in Saxony-Anhalt did not occur in a political vacuum. Immigration has occupied an important place in the party’s politics, and AfD politicians have promoted the concept of remigration. The party disputes interpretations that describe the term as a programme for expelling German citizens with migration backgrounds and says its policies must operate within German law. (reuters.com)
The disagreement became unusually sharp in the Bundestag on September 9. Chancellor Friedrich Merz accused the AfD of promoting a conception of remigration that could amount to expulsion based on origin or skin colour. AfD representatives rejected his interpretation and maintained that their programme concerns people without a legal right to remain. (reuters.com)
I do not want to turn that dispute into a claim the evidence cannot support. Saying that the AfD currently has a lawful mechanism for removing German citizens such as my daughter would be wrong. The argument becomes more interesting when I stop asking who can legally be deported and instead ask whether German politics is placing ancestry back inside the definition of national belonging.
My daughter makes the question concrete. Her German passport answers the state when it asks who she is. Political rhetoric can pose a different question by asking where her family came from.
Germany Is No Longer Debating Immigration Only at the Border
Germany itself has changed enough to make the old categories increasingly awkward. In 2025, about 21.8 million people living in Germany had an immigration history, according to the Federal Statistical Office. They represented 26.3 percent of people in private main-residence households. (destatis.de)
The definition needs care. Destatis counts people who migrated to Germany themselves after 1950 or whose two parents did so. The 21.8 million are not all German citizens, and their legal situations differ considerably, so the figure cannot be used as a synonym for Germans with foreign ancestry. (destatis.de)
What the number does show is the scale of Germany’s demographic transformation. Immigration is no longer a subject confined to asylum centres or passport counters. It reaches workplaces and schools, while family histories that began elsewhere now run through German cities.
My granddaughter belongs to the part of that story that statistics can make strangely difficult to see. She is not waiting to become German after satisfying some future immigration requirement. She already possesses German citizenship, and Germany will be the country in which much of her childhood memory is formed.
When I think about her future in Munich, “Will Germany allow immigrants to stay?” is therefore the wrong question. It describes neither her citizenship nor her relationship with the country. I am more interested in whether citizenship will continue to provide the final political answer when somebody asks who belongs.
The AfD Has Already Challenged Citizenship Policy
There is an important legal boundary here. Governments can change the rules under which foreigners acquire citizenship more easily than they can dismantle the constitutional protections enjoyed by people who already possess it. Germany’s Basic Law does not freeze every naturalisation requirement permanently.
In March 2026, the AfD parliamentary group proposed reversing important elements of Germany’s citizenship policy. Its proposals included restoring the standard period before naturalisation to eight years, together with tougher requirements in areas such as language proficiency and economic self-sufficiency. (bundestag.de)
The Bundestag did not accept the initiative. In the recorded vote, 439 members supported rejection and 135 voted against rejection, leaving the AfD far short of the parliamentary support required for its proposal. (bundestag.de)
That parliamentary defeat is more informative than simply saying Germany has strong institutions. AfD can shift the political conversation while lacking enough votes to translate its preferences into federal law. A state-election victory, however dramatic, does not hand a party control over Germany’s constitutional system.
The distinction between legislation and the constitution becomes important here. A future parliamentary majority could alter ordinary naturalisation rules, subject to Germany’s constitutional and European legal constraints. Removing the Basic Law’s core protections for existing citizens would confront a much higher constitutional barrier.
I therefore see trajectory rather than immediate danger. AfD’s proposals concerning future citizenship deserve scrutiny, but they should not be confused with the present legal position of German citizens who happen to have family roots abroad.
Citizenship Cannot Regulate Every Conversation
Legal security does not guarantee social comfort. Reuters spoke to people with migration backgrounds in Saxony-Anhalt after the AfD victory, some of whom described uncertainty about their future. Organisations working with migrants also reported anxiety following the result. (reuters.com)
AfD says legal immigrants who contribute to German society should not fear its policies. Critics argue that the language surrounding migration can create insecurity beyond the population directly affected by deportation law. Both points belong in the discussion because legal status and social experience measure different things.
A German doctor does not cease being German because somebody objects to immigration. Nor does an engineer lose citizenship when an anti-immigration party gains seats. But a person can possess an unquestioned legal right to live somewhere and still notice that public arguments increasingly return to ancestry.
The economic consequences may extend beyond those already living in Germany. Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel warned on September 10 that the rise of the far right could hurt Germany’s attractiveness to foreign investors, and he also connected the political climate with Germany’s ability to attract workers from abroad. (reuters.com)
A qualified professional considering Munich does not calculate salary alone. He may also wonder what kind of childhood his family would have there, especially if he expects his children eventually to regard Germany as home. Those questions never appear neatly in labour-market statistics, but Germany’s ageing economy cannot entirely ignore them.
German Citizenship Carries Historical Weight
I keep returning to Article 16 because its language did not emerge from an ordinary political moment. Germany adopted the Basic Law in 1949 after a dictatorship had shown what could happen when the state decided that some people standing inside society no longer belonged there.
The post-war constitutional order placed individual rights beyond the convenience of an ordinary government majority. Equality before law received its own protection. German citizenship also acquired safeguards against arbitrary deprivation, with constitutional courts standing between political ambition and the boundaries established by the Basic Law.
None of that makes German democracy immune to electoral change. Parliament still writes laws within constitutional limits, while courts decide whether those laws remain inside them. Elections continually alter the political pressure placed on both institutions.
AfD’s rise therefore deserves attention without requiring exaggeration. German citizens with migration backgrounds are not suddenly facing deportation because of an election result in Saxony-Anhalt. At the same time, arguments over remigration have pushed questions about national membership deeper into everyday German politics.
For families like mine, the space between those facts is where the real story sits.
My Daughter Is Not Germany’s Guest
When I travel to Munich, my status changes the moment I approach the immigration counter. I carry documents showing why I am entering, and I know that my right to remain has a limit. A few hours later I can be drinking tea in my daughter’s home, but the warmth of that room does not change the legal distinction between us.
She does not live there under the same arrangement.
My daughter does not wake each morning in Germany because an immigration officer has temporarily permitted it. Her husband is not waiting for Germany to decide whether he belongs, and their child’s relationship with the country does not begin with a residence permit. They are German citizens.
My granddaughter may grow up speaking German without thinking much about the journey that brought part of her family’s history from South Asia into a Munich household. Karachi will remain somewhere behind her, in visits and family stories, while Germany will contain the school corridors and neighbourhood streets from which she constructs her own childhood.
I cannot know what German politics will look like when she becomes old enough to vote. The AfD may rise further, or Germany’s political currents may move somewhere none of today’s polling can predict. What stays with me is a smaller question, one that began when I looked at the Saxony-Anhalt result from Karachi: why should her family history ever require an explanation of the German citizenship she already possesses?