REFUGEES : Germany May Act to Reduce Asylum-Seekers : Main opposition party is expected to join the government and tighten the existing liberal law.

Following a prolonged struggle with their conscience, Germany’s main opposition Social Democrats are expected next week to bow to mounting public pressure and approve proposals that will permit a tightening of the industrialized world’s most liberal political asylum law.

Germany’s effectively open-door policy to asylum-seekers--for decades a proud symbol of the post-World War II democratic state’s good intent--has in recent years sown the seeds of a domestic nightmare.

A wave of xenophobic attacks directed against many of the 413,000 asylum-seekers presently in Germany awaiting action on their applications has shocked the world, generated fears of a Nazi-like revival and brought the asylum issue to the top of Germany’s political agenda.

The Social Democrats will tackle the problem at a special party congress here next Monday and Tuesday. They are expected to support a plan initially presented by their chairman, Bjoern Engholm, that would bring German law in line with the present Geneva Convention on Refugees and on a par with most of Germany’s European Community partners in dealing with the issue.

Engholm’s idea, roughly similar to that already proposed by Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s ruling coalition, would place a greater burden of proof on the asylum-seeker and also allow Germany to expel immediately anyone already rejected by another Geneva Convention signatory nation.

Because the present law is anchored in the German constitution, a two-thirds majority of Parliament must agree on the change--a majority that requires Kohl to have the Social Democrats’ help.

Officials within Kohl’s Christian Democrats contend that consultations to draft the needed constitutional change could begin immediately after Social Democrats vote next week and that the Bundestag could conceivably pass the law during its final session of the year in late December.

After months of delay, growing public frustration and a drumbeat of attacks against asylum-seekers and their residences by youthful right-wing radicals, Kohl is anxious to act.

Earlier this month, he talked about a “national state of emergency” and was reportedly prepared to invoke other parliamentary measures to stem the influx if the Social Democrats refused to support his call for restricting entry.

Bringing Germany into line with the Geneva Convention would close what for several years has been a back-door entry to the affluence and opportunity of Western Europe for Third World citizens.

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, the number of asylum-seekers entering Germany from eastern and southeastern Europe has added new social strains, exacerbating the country’s already critical housing shortage, adding further to a government financial burden already groaning under the demands of unification, and triggering widespread public resentment.

The number of asylum-seekers entering Germany this year is expected to reach nearly half a million.

While German Interior Ministry officials say that 95% of all political asylum claims are eventually rejected, the process can last years--a period during which the applicants can work and enjoy low-cost social housing and the other benefits of the German welfare state.

Efforts to accelerate the processing have hardly made a dent in the backlog.

Despite the misuse of the present law by many foreigners who see it as a way to improve their economic lot, a powerful minority of Germans are pushing to retain the present constitutional provision, known as Article 16, which reads simply, “The politically persecuted enjoy the right of asylum.”

Many older political figures from the center and moderate left view Article 16 as a cornerstone of the new Germany’s identity and a kind of debt to the global community in partial repayment for evils of the country’s Nazi past.

However, advocates for holding the status quo are likely to be pushed aside next week, in part because the Social Democrats’ leaders are convinced that they too must be seen to be acting to limit the influx of foreigners if they are to remain a credible political party.