How does Hamburg integrate refugees?
A conversation with Jan Pörksen
Hamburg is a city of flows: flows of goods, as a city of commerce and a pillar of the Hanseatic league, and flows of people, as a natural consequence of this situation. Ripe with Scandinavian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Middle Eastern influences, the harbor city remains one of migrations today, with one third of its population and half of its children of a migration background. No wonder, then, that integration is a central consideration in Hamburg, and one that predates the arrival, starting in 2015, of a significant refugee population fleeing conflict and unrest in Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan.
On 2 February 2017, La Fabrique de la Cité’s working group on refugees and European cities traveled to Hamburg to meet Jan Pörksen, State Secretary for Labor, Social and Family Affairs and Integration, in order to better understand how the city is working to integrate its new inhabitants.
Housing, a stepping stone to integration
Shortly after its inception, the ZKF began actively seeking out empty lots and free spaces where refugees could be sheltered. Yet the initiative was quickly outpaced by the flow of refugees, which increased significantly in the summer of 2015. “We had Fridays where we would not know where to put the people on Sunday”, recounts Secretary Pörksen. Three bankrupt department stores served as makeshift shelters for the newly arrived. “I remember we had one place we obtained the contract for on Wednesday, and Friday afternoon we had the first people coming in and assigned them some army beds — it was a wild situation,” Pörksen adds.
Hamburg’s housing market had already been under significant stress prior to the mass arrival of refugees; however, no new public social housing had been built in several years. The city quickly put together an emergency response plan involving the use of the fairground halls to host people and harnessing the capabilities of a strong grassroots network of volunteers. In this initial phase, the city often found itself hiring upwards of 20 social workers per week. Concurrently, eager to provide refugees with more sustainable accommodation options, Hamburg began to pursue longer-term housing solutions, fully aware of the contradiction between life in an emergency shelter and long-term social integration into the urban fabric. Thus, the city’s preexisting target of building 6,000 new apartments yearly was extended to 10,000, with a view to ensure that the 35,000 refugees living in public housing would not have to live in containers or mobile homes, a situation detrimental to integration.
The city thus endeavored to work hand in hand with the construction, development and urban planning sectors to envisage new solutions, but soon found that the lengthy procedures needed to launch the desired construction would require refugees to continue sleeping in tents for the foreseeable future. Not one to abandon quickly, the city opted to “break some rules and just go around and do things,” Jan Pörksen recounts. Taking full responsibility, public leaders asked the federal leadership to ease construction laws in order to facilitate the construction of refugee accommodation, a choice that ultimately allowed the city to build in areas not normally intended for residential construction.
Hamburg opted to build quarters for 3,000 to 4,000 people in each of its districts, numbers which raised the issue of possible urban segregation or ghettoization, but which seemed necessary at a time when it was not yet clear that the number of arrivals would soon begin to decrease significantly. The move triggered civil protests in several wealthy neighborhoods, with demonstrators asking for public shelters to have a maximum capacity of 300, with a one-kilometer minimum distance between each. A compromise was eventually reached, with the city vowing to construct smaller shelters, while going ahead with its initial plan. Today, the city’s shelters can accommodate 300 individuals on average, and Hamburg’s largest shelter, which can house 900, will likely be shut down before the end of the year.
Integration through education and employment
From its experience welcoming significant numbers of Yugoslavian refugees in the 1990s, Hamburg already knew the importance of early-age integration. “All shelters from the very first day have child-care facilities”, notes Jan Pörksen. Accordingly, Hamburg is investing substantial financial means into early education. “50% of children who only go to kindergarten for one year before going to school and have another native language than German end up needing language support when they get to school. If the children go to nursing school or kindergarten for three years before going to school, this number decreases to 1°% even in neighborhoods with 80% of people with a migrant background,” says Jan Pörksen. “Early education for children is an excellent investment.”
A prerequisite to integration into the local labor market and long-term social integration, language proficiency, too, is a fundamental component of Hamburg’s integration policy. A one-year German language track is available at all levels of schooling (secondary school, gymnasium, etc.), after which students are redirected to the regular track in an effort not to separate them from other students. This focus on language learning explains the fact that the number of refugees integrated into the Hamburg labor market remains small, as many of them are currently still enrolled in language courses. Finally, the city makes special efforts towards ensuring that refugee women enroll in these language courses.
As for employment, the city found itself faced with a significant challenge: “The Hamburg labor market is growing”, remarks Jan Pörksen, “but still offers very little non-skilled labor”, a problem for the many refugees with low qualifications. Hamburg has thus been particularly active in developing and opening up its lesser-skilled labor market. In those efforts, the city enjoys substantial support from a network of companies as well as the local Chambers of Commerce and Craftsmanship, with which it notably organized a series of job fairs dedicated to matching lower-skilled refugees with employment opportunities in the tourism, hotel, and restaurant industries.
Concurrently, in the interest of matching labor supply with demand, the city embarked on an ambitious effort to assess the skills of its new inhabitants, profiling them to see how much formal education and professional training they could avail themselves of. The City found that 60% of refugees had received at least ten years of schooling, but that while many were skilled, the majority could not offer certifications of those skills, precluding official recognition of their qualifications. These individuals were offered skill assessment courses developed in partnership with the Chamber of Craftsmanship and the Chamber of Commerce and received an additional qualification before obtaining a final degree.
Additionally, Hamburg inserts refugees into an apprenticeship system through vocational schools, which offer language training and are mandatory for all individuals aged 16 and over. The German apprenticeship system offers schemes whereby refugees attend classes three days each week and spend the two remaining days interning in a corporate environment, an apprenticeship which Jan Pörksen notes is a particularly effective pathway to integration into the labor market. Asylum-seekers who have secured an apprenticeship contract may continue to work there for two additional years after their asylum application is rejected; after these two years have elapsed, they may apply as regular migrants.
Finally, the city makes substantial efforts to convince those refugees tempted to work minimum wage in order to send remittances to their families back home to invest instead in their own education and work towards obtaining a qualification. Hamburg subsidizes this qualification process, simultaneously working to convince potential employers to lower their language proficiency expectations.
Integration, the Hamburg way
Hamburg is adamant on the necessity to open general systems to refugees, who are thought to be likely to stay in the city for a long time, and to avoid special “refugee tracks” at all costs, in education and employment alike: “We are not trying to build an additional segment in the labor market because we are scared that people might get stuck in it”, Jan Pörksen remarks. This stance provides a guiding principle applied to all integration policies and measures deployed by the city.
Hamburg’s city-state status and wealth were considerable advantages in jumpstarting and ensuring the success of its refugee integration policy. Hamburg notably did not have to contend with the issues that poorer cities with significant structural problems, such as cities in the Rhine-Ruhr area, had to face. This influence, combined with its determination, allowed the city to bring its vision for the housing and integration of refugees to life: “We had to break rules and the public administration never worked together the way we have for the past two years”, says Jan Pörksen. And indeed, Hamburg had always understood that successful integration would require coordinated efforts from local authorities, as well as increased cooperation with civic leaders and other urban stakeholders. As early as 2011, the city joined forces with the Hamburg Integration Council, a consortium of migrant organizations, to implement a new policy aimed at nudging its inhabitants away from an antagonistic “us and them” discourse towards increased awareness of their shared identity as Hamburg citizens. Further, since 2014, Hamburg’s seven districts have gathered weekly around the table to work towards common solutions to the challenge of welcoming and integrating refugees.
Coordination with civic stakeholders also proved instrumental to Hamburg’s response to the arrival of refugees; the help and assistance afforded by volunteers and newly formed organizations played a significant part in welcoming refugees and providing for their needs. One striking example of a highly efficient, civic initiative aimed at refugees is Hanseatic Help, whose founder, Arnd Boekhoff, the working group met during its visit to Hamburg.
While the brunt of the crisis has now passed, the need for cooperation and coordination remains. “Now the major challenge is to keep working well”, says Secretary Pörksen.
La Fabrique de la Cité is a think tank on urban transitions and innovations. Find out more about our work here.
This article is part of La Fabrique de la Cité’s current research project, “From Asylum-Seeking to City-Making: Asylum-Seekers and Refugees in European Cities.”
