Refugees are settling into German society, four years into Europe’s migrant crisis
By Sofia Mejias-Pascoe
This summer, as U.S. border control and immigration agencies work to limit the influx of asylum-seeking migrants at the southern border, in Germany, refugee families splash in inflatable pools and lay under shaded areas to beat the heat. Thousands of refugees are already years into their stay in the country, some mastering the language, finding jobs and settling into the community.
Germany not only provides asylum to refugees, but has developed programs that carve a path for refugees to become fully-functioning members of society.
Around 1.5 million migrants entered Germany in 2015 after Chancellor Angela Merkel announced an emergency refugee absorption policy to relieve the border pressure on Turkey, Greece, Italy and other southern countries in crisis. It allowed Syrian and other refugees to register in Germany, rather than the first EU country they reached. Merkel’s decision played out as an open call to asylum-seekers heading north from the Middle East, Africa and Asia fleeing violence, political persecution and economic collapse in their countries.
Chris Mezler, senior external relations officer for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees office in Berlin, said Germany’s work to help refugees is extensive and stands out among the EU.
“Germany’s the fifth biggest country as a host country and at the same time, Germany is the second biggest donor country for UNHCR, so what this country is doing for us, for the refugees is really amazing,” Mezler said.
Now, four years later, Germany is still processing refugee-claimants from across the world seeking sanctuary in a country that will accept them. Between 2015 and 2018, the country received over 500,000 asylum applications from Syria alone, the national group that makes up the largest proportion of asylum-seekers, followed by Iraq, according to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF).
Challenges remain for the migrant and refugee population in the country — overcoming cultural differences, finding ample housing, learning the language. But Germany and its generous political asylum procedures stand as an example of a nation that “can do it,” as Merkel famously cried out in 2015 at the height of the biggest immigration intake the country has seen.
Merkel’s bold decision, which drew both international acclaim and criticism, was met with significant backlash from anti-refugee groups. Germany’s government was overwhelmed by backlogs in registration claims, overcrowded refugee facilities and the need to recruit thousands more teachers and police into the workforce to accommodate the growing population.
Not everyone in Germany was open to the idea of accepting so many refugees at once. While refugee supporters welcomed the newcomers off trains with teddy bears and flowers, citizens on the far right sometimes responded with harassment — ranging from Neo-Nazis singing Third Reich melodies to arsonist attacks. In one of these attacks, arsonist deliberately set a gym to fire in Nauen that was slated to house 130 refugees. In Bautzen in Eastern Saxony in 2016, a trio intending to kill refugees set fire to a hotel undergoing conversion to become a refugee shelter, and crowds stood by cheering as it burned.
But immigrant arrival numbers in Germany have subsided — down to 185,000 migrant arrivals in 2018, according to BAMF. These arrivals, though declining in numbers, have been making their way into daily German life, said Mezler
Now that the initial shock of the influx has dissipated, the German government is turning its focus for the migrant population to a new goal: integration.
“The most important, the big word now is ‘integration’. So what needs to be done to integrate all of these people?” Mezler said.
Germany aims to bring refugees into ordinary communities, specifically into the workforce. The first step, Mezler said, is learning the German language. Refugees are usually required to take German integration courses in which they learn the language as well as the culture, legal system and history of the country.
“If you have the language and you find the job, then all the other things are not a big deal anymore. When you have a job, it’s much easier to find friends,” Mezler said.
For the Almousa family, who fled Syria after bombings destroyed both their homes in Damascus and Quneitra, learning German starts with the kids. The father of the family, Ziyad, came to Berlin with his wife and five children toward the end of 2015 after a five-month trek north from Syria. Now, they live in a suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of Berlin, where the five kids attend school and have quickly picked up German.
Eleven-year-old Rima is now able to translate from Arabic to German for her parents, who are learning German as well but at a slower pace. But the youngest child, Hassan, age 6, knows German better than Arabic. The difference in language skills between the parents and the children in the Almousa family mirrors the differences in their feelings toward Syria.
For the kids, Germany has become their home. It’s where their friends are and where they attend school. But Ziyad said his heart remains in Syria, where his parents and other family members remain, unable to make the journey to join them in Germany.
Of the migrants who arrived in 2015 and 2016, around 300,000 have secured jobs in Germany, Mezler said, a testament to a system that, despite its imperfections, does work to help refugees.
“This is an amazing number, an amazing figure. We hope that this figure will double soon. Let’s see,” Mezler said.
But beyond looking at the numbers, integration can also be measured in how well refugee groups are able to get along with in a different culture.
“Refugees sometimes think, ‘Hey, we invited our German neighbors twice for a barbecue or something and, almost no one came, what is the problem there?’” Mezler said. “When you have a German as a friend, he would probably be a friend for life, but it’s not that easy to really get in contact. These are cultural differences.”
Refugees have to adjust not only to German culture but to the culture of other refugee groups, some of whom come from ideologically opposing sides of conflicts back home, such as ethnic groups in Syria and Lebanon, Mezler said.
Refugee centers in Germany also help migrants to integrate into German society by providing a sort of “halfway house” for those who have already received legal refugee status from the government, said Paul McGimpsey, director of a Red Cross refugee center in the Wilmersdorf neighborhood of Berlin.
The refugee center entrance is guarded by a security room, where posters on the wall display the faces of missing refugees. Inside the compound, neat rows of white converted shipping containers cover the majority of the lot. Each container has a door, windows and small area for gardening, where residents tend to flowers in planting boxes. On a hot Wednesday last month, children could be seen playing throughout the maze of containers, tossing around a water hose and splashing in inflatable pools.
McGimpsey said centers like his “prepare [refugees] for the real world” by providing housing, classes and other resources. But most of all, they train refugees on how to get by in German society independently and access resources available to them outside the center after they leave.
“The reality is that when they leave here, they’re not going to have this help,” McGimpsey said. “We’ve had residents come back and still seek help, but that’s not the idea. You want them to be able to seek help themselves.”
Daniel Desale, a refugee living in the center, has been in Berlin for two years now, after fleeing Eritrea five years ago when he was 18. He always dreamed of coming to Germany when he was younger and remembers watching soccer games and cheering for the German team.
But Desale’s decision to leave Eritrea is not supported by his family. He said he’s not like the rest of his family, and because of that was forced to leave his home and his entire family behind without telling anyone.
“I didn’t tell anybody I was leaving. I left at midnight while everybody was sleeping and snuck out,” Desale said.
Now, when Desale is able to talk to his mother via a cell phone app, she isn’t happy with his decision to leave. Still, without any family in Berlin, Desale says he is always able to find people in Berlin to help him navigate the city.
“I know that there are good and bad people everywhere, but in Germany I’ve only come across the good ones,” he said.
Desale’s positive experience in Berlin came against a backdrop of political violence in Germany from the nationalist right. In June, the murder of Walter Lübcke, a German Christian Democratic union politician, sparked new fears about the rise of anti-refugee violence. Rightwing extremist group said Lübcke’s would be the first of a series of murders to be carried out by against pro-refugee politicians and refugees themselves.
In 2015 and 2017, rightwing extremists attacked German mayors Henriette Reker and Andreas Hollstein, respectively, for their stances and policies on refugee asylum. While refugees are becoming an ever more common presence in everyday German life, anti-foreigner extremists have not moderated their views and the anti-immigrant party Alternative for Germany (AfD), continues to gain supporters.
Another problem facing refugees— one that keeps them in the Red Cross Center longer than planned — is the difficulty of finding housing in Berlin, a city that McGimpsey said is already “overfilled.” Sometimes the newcomers get lucky and find an apartment with someone they know in the city or enter special programs that pair Berlin residents with refugees to live together.
McGimpsey said the center is designed to be a temporary housing solution for refugees, but some families end up wanting to stay at the complex indefinitely because it provides child care and education.
The Hashami family has no plans to leave the center any time soon. They came to Germany three years ago from Iran, where poor economic and educational opportunities and the threat of war drove them to flee.
To get to Germany they had to travel through mountains for weeks, paddling from Turkey to Greece in an inflatable raft and “walking and walking and walking in the direction of lots of other people,” said Elays Hashami, the patriarch of the family. The journey was “incredibly difficult,” especially because his youngest son had just been born, he added.
“My youngest son at the time was only two weeks old and we were traveling without any food, water, any place to sleep, any money, just with hopes of getting to Germany,” Hashami said.
Now that they are in Berlin, the Hashami family is focusing on learning German and dealing with the record-breaking summer heat, which reached over 100º Fahrenheit in June. Despite the weather, the family wants to stay in Berlin.
“We’re happy here and we don’t have to struggle like we did back home,” Hashami said. “We want to stay here and we want to have a good life in Berlin.”
Though some families dream of returning to their home countries one day if peace in the country permits it, others echo the Hashami’s desire to remain in Berlin.
Mezler, of the UNHCR, said refugees who are well-integrated into German society have the possibility to stay in Germany, even if their refugee status ends due to peace in their country.
He described one family that doesn’t plan on ever leaving Berlin. As Christians from Damascus, they believe they will remain a persecuted minority in Syria in the future.
“They think ‘We can’t go back to Syria, we could somehow live in Syria in the past, but this is over,’” Mezler said. “The father is my age, so in the middle 40s, and he says, ‘Don’t care for us. We are a lost generation, but our children, they need a future.’”
Sofia Mejias-Pascoe is a third-year communication major and Spanish minor at UC Santa Barbara. She writes about culture and politics from an international perspective, and plans a career as a foreign correspondent.
