If the urgent challenge for Germany last year was sheltering the hundreds of thousands of people who descended on the country almost at once seeking asylum, then this year’s task is to integrate them.
However, before that can happen, there is sifting to do. Lots of it.
More than 1 million refugees have arrived in Germany, but the government says that far fewer will stay.
Illustration: Yusha
So far, only 660,000 have permission to remain, officials said.
The federal government has urged Germany’s 16 states to double last year’s total of about 60,000 deportations.
To whittle down the numbers, the authorities are halting family reunifications for two years and rejecting tens of thousands of applicants from the Balkans, Algeria and Morocco, saying that these countries are not at war.
The task of deciding who will stay and who will go has fallen to officials like Frank-Juergen Weise, 64, who has led Germany’s sprawling federal employment agency, based in Nuremberg, since 2004.
As the backlog of asylum applications surged to 300,000 last year, Weise, a colonel in the military reserves, was also tapped to lead the federal agency for migration, conveniently headquartered in the same Bavarian city.
He has called the huge backlog “an embarrassment for Germany” and said: “The impression arose that Germany has no plan as to what to do with the refugees.”
The energetic Weise has engaged thousands of officials and begun a digital centralization of records to speed the processing of asylum applications and keep tabs on newcomers.
Open battles have erupted with entrenched officials who argue that new, hurriedly trained recruits lack the experience to judge asylum applicants.
The security forces want to keep out would-be terrorists and Muslim extremists, and to steer new arrivals to specific places of residence to prevent new refugee ghettos from forming in cities.
Weise shares those concerns, but argues for faster handling to get refugees into German language lessons and integration courses, and then into the labor market.
The government announced this month that it intends to subsidize up to 100,000 jobs for unskilled workers.
DIFFICULTIES
However, the difficulty of allaying security concerns and speeding integration quickly emerges when observing the individual asylum hearings mandated by law and international agreement.
Even a straightforward case, of a Syrian man interviewed this month near Nuremberg, consumed well more than an hour, with translation for each question and answer.
The interviewing official then had to do the same for the man’s wife. At this pace, officials are lucky to handle four cases in a day, even working the 50-hour weeks Weise has requested.
However, as Weise sees it, this is the only way to fulfill German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mantra: “We’ll manage this.”
“I can’t say, ‘We’ll try,’” he said.
So it is that the fates of eight, mostly young, men from Algeria and Morocco, gathered in a makeshift meeting room in Cologne, now rest in the hands of officials like him.
With a map of Germany and handwritten declensions of German verbs taped to the walls, the refugees, most of whom arrived late last year, said that all they wanted to do was learn German, get out of this refugee facility for about 600 people, work, pay taxes and build the future denied them at home.
“We are praying for the people to accept us and not to discriminate,” said Younis, 23, from Algiers. “Not every dark-haired person is a criminal. We want to be treated as people. We are all equal.”
However, after an outpouring of welcome last fall, attitudes have toughened, particularly in the wake of hundreds of sexual assaults by young men in Cologne on New Year’s Eve last year — a night that has become a symbol of troubled integration and a clash of cultural values.
Of the 153 suspects identified in more than 1,500 cases of robbery and sexual assault, 103 are from Algeria and Morocco, according to the authorities.
Cologne police chief Juergen Mathies said in an interview that most of the suspects had arrived in the recent influx of refugees.
Almost all of the 130 people charged so far are between the ages of 18 and 25, said Wolfgang Schorn, a court spokesman.
Faced with these facts, and punished by voters who supported a rising anti-immigrant party in three state elections, a wary German government is strengthening law enforcement and anti-terrorism efforts, and trying to speed integration.
Even refugees who are eventually deported should be occupied somehow while here, Merkel has said, and they can take home any skills acquired.
Otherwise, German President Joachim Gauck said, “we risk that frustration and boredom turn into violence and crime, or that political and religious extremism flourish.”
In Cologne, security fears are doubly acute after the New Year’s Eve assaults and the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels. Cologne is close to the borders with both Belgium and France. Tension is palpable.
Mathies, the city’s new police chief has sharply increased police patrols, particularly around the station and cathedral where the New Year’s assaults took place.
He said this was needed to restore public trust in the security forces.
NOT ALL THE SAME
By contrast, Younis and his friends all talked resentfully of greater police presence, in cafes and on the streets. The Muslim assailants in Paris and Belgium were born and educated in Europe, they said.
“The European leaders must differentiate between them and the people who came to secure their future and improve their economic situation,” said Abdul Rahim, a 27-year-old Algerian.
He said that “newcomers do not commit the kind of acts you saw here on New Year’s Eve.”
The group was bitter that official language and integration lessons are open only to Syrians and others likely to win permission to stay.
However, officials now warn that, even with special courses and attention, many of those staying will lack suitable labor skills — a shift from initial buoyant predictions from industry, which needs workers.
Most of the refugees come from countries where schooling lasts years less than in Germany, said Karl Brenke, a labor and migration expert at the German Institute for Economic Research.
Qualifications are difficult to compare. Already, there are 14 people competing for a basic unskilled job, Brenke said.
He provided figures showing that the number of employable people who are jobless and living on welfare had swelled to 280,000 in December last year from 116,000 in early 2011. Half are Syrians.
Brenke said he saw a danger that refugees could remain unemployed for years.
Even Weise admits that employment could prove tough. Seventy percent of asylum applicants last year were under 30, he said. Ten percent could find work within a year and 50 percent within five years.
Even without accommodating the North Africans, he said, it is already clear that “the refugees are not the workforce that the German economy needs.”
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