Back in the autumn of last year, in a train in Freilassing, a German police officer came through the carriage and asked for everyone’s passport.

“Why are you checking all the passengers on this train?” I asked him, in German.
“Because we check everyone at this border”
“Sorry you don’t. Less than an hour ago I was at the road border south of Freilassing and nothing was being checked”
“We check everyone”
“No you do not. I have seen it with my own eyes”
“Have a nice day”
And on he went, our train delayed ten minutes because of the time it took to do the controls.

There is nothing quite like this little example to illustrate the outright absurdity of border controls within the Schengen zone.

In the past two years as part of my #CrossBorderRail project, I have been to a lot of borders, many of them in the most forgotten corners of the European Union.

For every high profile border crossing Germany to Poland – like Frankfurt (Oder) – Słubice – there are dozens of tiny ones, like Krzewina Zgorzelecka – Ostritz, or the cycle path between Kołbaskowo and Gryfino that follows the border. As well as the well known Germany to Czechia crossing Bad Schandau – Děčín, there is the tiny cycle path Holzhau – Moldava v Krusných horách, and the little footbridge across the river Brandov – Hirschberg.

So when Germany’s Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser announces that Germany is going to do border controls at all of its borders, she simply cannot mean all the borders. For controlling even all the border crossings is simply impossible – practically. The German state does not have the financial and human resources to do it, even if Faeser wanted to.

Sure, they will station some more police at big roads, delay some more trains on main lines, and pick on more passengers who look like they are from ethnic minorities. But any criminal who is semi-organised would be able to get around the controls amazingly easily, because controls simply cannot happen everywhere. Sure, some people will be picked up by the controls – because some people migrating will be idiots, and not check where controls happen, so as to be able to get around them. That you pick up some clueless or vulnerable people is not a proof that your policy is working.

And meanwhile the more controls happen, so it inconveniences people who have to cross borders on an everyday basis – the very people for whom the promise of European integration actually mattered on to their daily lives.

So instead what Faeser is doing is the worst sort of security theatre – trying to reassure the population that something is being done about a non-problem that the screaming populists of the CDU, BSW and AfD have been crowing about in the media. The whole premise of the European Union Schengen system is that migration is controlled at the external borders, meaning controls then do not have to happen at the internal borders. Why then has the SPD, a supposedly pro-EU party, abandoned a commitment to this? And indeed why has the CDU done likewise? And why have the Grüne – in the coalition with the the SPD – just stomached this? (I have no hope for the FDP).

What Germany is doing here is practically unworkable, and ethically wrong. That is grim.