The German Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, yesterday clashed with his coalition partners in the Greens over immigration by backing a declaration by his Interior Minister that Germany already has enough foreigners.
Mr Otto Schily, a former lawyer who once defended terrorists from the Baader-Meinhof gang, sparked a storm of protest with his remarks last week to a Berlin newspaper.
"The limit of Germany's tolerance of immigration has been surpassed," he said.
Critics, especially within the Greens, complained that Mr Schily's statement was grimly reminiscent of the sentence "the boat is full", which was used by the Swiss when they refused entry to Jewish refugees from Hitler during the 1930s. Right-wingers revived the slogan in the early 1990s during a campaign to tighten Germany's asylum laws.
"Schily is talking without thinking," sneered the Green MEP, Mr Daniel Cohn-Bendit, expressing a view shared by many of the minister's Social Democratic colleagues.
But in an interview published yesterday in the Hamburg-based weekly Die Woche, Mr Schroder defended the Interior Minister's remarks. "He was only describing the reality that Germany cannot cope with more immigration," he said.
Greens yesterday attacked the Chancellor's intervention as insensitive, accusing him of sending the wrong signal to Germany's foreign residents.
Seven million foreigners live in Germany, representing 9 per cent of the total population. More than half - 52 per cent - of Germans believe there are too many immigrants already and only 7 per cent would like to see more arriving.
Mr Schroder pointed out that Germany has accepted more refugees than any other European country, with 382,763 people arriving from the former Yugoslavia in 1992 alone.
But most refugees have now returned home and the number of foreigners in Germany is falling. More foreigners left Germany last year than arrived. Even if most Germans do not want any more immigrants, population experts agree that they will need more foreigners as the years go by.
Germany's ageing population will need at least 300,000 newcomers from abroad over the next 15 years to finance the rising cost of old-age pensions. Even today, most foreigners contribute more to the German economy than they take out of it.
Mr Schroder insists that his government is committed to giving immigrants a fair deal and the coalition is pledged to change Germany's antiquated citizenship law so that foreigners can integrate more easily.
However, many critics fear that the current debate will make the integration process more difficult by feeding the prejudice of the majority.
