Anecdotally, I find that there is a huge gulf in the attitude of women who come down on the "compassionate" side of the immigration crisis and men who predominantly understand that compassion is akin to pregnancy, it has ultimate consequences. In that, my neighbors reflect electoral demographics of America, with women supporting Democrats.
The overall problem in Germany concerning immigration has to do with its unique history beyond the mindless shibboleths that, "diversity is our strength" or "we are all immigrants," is unique to Germany in that it has to do with the huge movement of population after the first and second world wars. I speak to my neighbors and they tell me tales of their parents' struggle then to feed passing refugees who have been pushed out of Czechoslovakia or Prussia or elsewhere in the East. Many of them tell tales of their own parents being those refugees roaming the roads and begging for food or sleeping rough. I have read accounts of my local county in which the citizens were organized to go into the forest cut wood to heat with while housing was assigned to desperate Germans pushed here by the communists. At the end of the Cold War there was not so much demographic movement as demographic integration with the incorporation of the former East Germany.
All of this is noted to fill out understanding that immigration in Germany has a more immediate meaning than it does for Americans. We are witness in a rather remote way to the invasion from Mexico but that is an entirely different equation than your parents starving on the road to a refugee camp or to a relative's house somewhere in Germany because you are driven there by the Russians.
But that does not mean that the Germans are free of delusion concerning what Merkel is doing. The whole idea of giving away control of a country's borders unavoidably means giving away sovereignty over one's country. It is not just borders over which Germans have lost control, but their courts and their economy even their land-use controls. They had been for generations used to looking to the county seat, or to Munich as the capital of Bavaria, or to Berlin or Bonn as the capital of Germany but now they must look to Brussels or Geneva. In my anecdotal experience many Germans don't even understand that they have lost control over their own affairs by moving the venue of decision-making far from home.
Bavarians like to consider themselves to be a unique part of Germany with prerogatives such as their own border patrol but that element of sovereignty is being swept away and with it control over immigration. As the venue of control over the lives of Bavarians moves farther and farther away from Bavaria, the men, at least, are beginning to understand the political implications. I usually say that America fought a civil war over the same issues and very often one can see light bulbs lighting up on hearing that.
Germany is essentially a country without talk radio and therefore no opposition to leftism. Angela Merkel does not face a Mark Levin and the people have been indoctrinated for so long according to what Nancy Pelosi believes that there is no instinctive conservative position, only a preposterous and disreputable far right. Couple this with the reaction to the "Hitler time" and one can see that the death grip of political correctness which we encounter in America over immigration can be even more severe in Germany.
My German neighbors think like suburbanites in America but they are simply not exposed to conservatism. Their instincts are the same as the instincts of my neighbors with whom I grew up but they are not refined by exposure to conservatism. The result, a myopic view of politics, and inability to break free of political correctness that binds because of Germany's unique history, and a centuries long confidence in the power of government and respect for institutions which have been there since Bismarck.
Yet Germany has an amazing history of coping with adversity and emerging with an astonishingly well functioning society. One wonders if that history will repeat itself when Germany is no longer Germany because of immigration.
