"Wir
schaffen das "or" We will manage it" was one remark of many that
German Chancellor Angela Merkel made during a press conference in Berlin back
in 2015. Over a million refugees arrived in Germany seeking asylum, making it
the largest incoming refugee population since World War II. Her constituents —
and the world — wanted to know how she would handle it.
Merkel’s
remark launched a thousand think pieces, and it galvanized the far-right. Five
years later, we're using data to square how well Merkel’s policies have helped
those refugees adapt and integrate into life in Germany. In essence, we answer
the question: did Merkel manage it?
How Angela Merkel’s great migrant gamble paid off
The
Observer
Germany
Five years ago, as more and more refugees crossed into
Europe, Germany’s chancellor proclaimed, ‘We’ll manage this.’ Critics said it
was her great mistake – but she has been proved right
Philip
Oltermann
Philip
Oltermann in Berlin
@philipoltermann
Sun 30 Aug
2020 07.02 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/30/angela-merkel-great-migrant-gamble-paid-off
Mohammad
Hallak found the key to unlock the mysteries of his new homeland when he
realised you could switch the subtitles on your Netflix account to German. The
21-year-old Syrian from Aleppo jotted down words he didn’t know, increased his
vocabulary and quickly became fluent. Last year, he passed his end of high
school exams with a grade of 1.5, the top mark in his year group.
Five years
to the month after arriving in Germany as an unaccompanied minor, Hallak is now
in his third term studying computer science at the Westphalian University of
Applied Sciences and harbours an aspiration to become an IT entrepreneur.
“Germany was always my goal”, he says, in the mumbled sing-song of the Ruhr
valley dialect. “I’ve always had a funny feeling that I belong here.”
Hallak, an
exceptionally motivated student with high social aptitude, is not
representative of all the 1.7 million people who applied for asylum in Germany
between 2015 and 2019, making it the country with the second highest population
of refugees in the world. Some of those with whom he trekked through Turkey and
across the Mediterranean, he says, haven’t picked up more than a few words and
“just chill”.
But Hallak
is not a complete outlier either. More than 10,000 people who arrived in
Germany as refugees since 2015 have mastered the language sufficiently to enrol
at a German university. More than half of those who came are in work and pay
taxes. Among refugee children and teenagers, more than 80% say they have a
strong sense of belonging to their German schools and feel liked by their
peers.
Success
stories like Hallak’s partially redeem the optimism expressed by Angela Merkel
in a sentence she spoke five years ago this week, at the peak of one of the
most tumultuous years in recent European history – a sentence that nearly cost
her her job and that she herself has partially retreated from.
“I put it
simply, Germany is a strong country,” the German chancellor told the media at a
press conference in central Berlin on 31 August 2015, trying to address concerns
about the steeply rising number of people – mostly from Syria, Iraq and
Afghanistan – applying for asylum in Germany that summer.
“The motive
with which we approach these matters must be: we have already managed so much,
we’ll manage this.” During the German TV broadcast of her interview, headlines
flashed up to report that Hungary was sending trainloads of people to the
German border, 20,000 of whom turned up at Munich central station the following
week alone.
The German
phrase Merkel used, Wir schaffen das, became so memorable mainly because it
would in the weeks and months that followed be endlessly quoted back at her by
those who believed that the German chancellor’s optimistic message had
encouraged millions more migrants to embark on a dangerous odyssey across the
Med. “Merkel’s actions, now, will be hard to correct: her words cannot be
unsaid,” wrote the Spectator. “She has exacerbated a problem that will be with
us for years, perhaps decades.”
Asylum applications
The
Alternative für Deutschland party, founded two years previously on a more
narrowly anti-euro ticket, discovered a new populist stride: when Merkel said
“We will manage”, the rightwing party claimed, she really meant “You will
manage”, asking the German public to cope with rising levels of crime,
terrorism and public disorder.
“We don’t
want to manage this!” the AfD politician Alexander Gauland proclaimed at a
party rally in October 2015. Over the coming months and years – in the wake of
the New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Cologne, the Bataclan terror attack in
Paris and the truck rampage on Berlin’s Breitscheidtplatz Christmas market –
that sentiment seemed to gain traction with a growing part of the German
population, even when the crimes were not carried out by people who had arrived
in 2015.
By 2017,
there was a prevalent view that Wir schaffen das would be Merkel’s undoing, a
“catastrophic mistake” as Donald Trump said in January that year. “The worst
decision a European leader has made in modern times,” Nigel Farage told Fox
News. “She’s finished.”
Yet today
Merkel still sits at the top of Europe’s largest economy, her personal approval
ratings back to where they were at the start of 2015 and the polling of her
party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), buoyed to record levels by the
global pandemic. When Merkel steps down ahead of federal elections in 2021, as
is expected, her party’s successor currently looks more likely to be a centrist
in her mould than a hardliner promising a symbolic break with her stance on
immigration.
The question is
what could she have done differently? You can’t seal a wide-open border with
rhetoric and a few guards
Gerald Knaus, migration expert
The AfD,
meanwhile, never reached the point “when it will be the country’s
second-largest party”, as historian Niall Ferguson predicted in February 2018.
The party has established a steady presence in local parliaments across
Germany, especially in the states of the formerly socialist east. But at
federal level the AfD has dropped to fourth in the polls, down from its third
place and 12.6% at elections in 2017, and has been stricken with infighting
since immigration has dropped off the top of the political agenda.
The spectre
of jihadist terrorism, which some feared the refugee crisis would usher into
the heart of central Europe, has faded from view in recent years. After a spate
of seven attacks with an Islamist motive in Germany in 2016, culminating with a
truck driven into a Berlin Christmas market that December, the country has seen
no further attacks for the last three years.
Peter
Neumann, a terrorism expert at King’s College London’s Department of War
Studies, recalls being invited onto a German TV programme at the height of the
crisis in 2015. “I gave my optimistic best back then, but deep down I was
worried,” he says. “Will this work out? With nearly a million people about whom
we know so little? In the end, those fears were misplaced.
“We know
that some of the men involved in the Bataclan attack had exploited the chaos to
smuggle themselves into Europe, in some cases posing as Syrian refugees. We
also knew that the vast majority of people who arrived were young men, the very
demographic is most susceptible to radicalisation. And yet, we can now say that
the worst fears haven’t come true.
“In
hindsight, Isis’s collapse happened quicker than we expected. It’s now clear
that what made them so attractive for a while is less their ideology than their
success. And when Isis stopped being successful, it stopped being attractive.”
However,
Neumann says this was also due to the increasing efficiency of German
intelligence agencies. According to data collected by Petter Nesser, a senior
research fellow with the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, 16 terror
plots with a jihadist motive have been foiled on German soil since the start of
2015, more than in France or the UK over the same period.
Countries of origin
The events
of the summer of 2015 did evidently mobilise and further radicalise Germany’s
rightwing extremist circles, who targeted asylum shelters with arson attacks or
assassinated politicians with pro-immigration views, such as the CDU’s Walter
Lübcke. No other country in Europe saw as much severe and fatal rightwing
violence in 2019 as Germany.
Germany’s
Federal Office of Criminal Investigations records a rise of criminal offences,
including violent crime, in the years between 2014 and 2016, linking the trend
to the influx of migration. The percentage of asylum seekers found guilty of
such crimes also doubled in the same period. However, the majority of these
offences were within the refugee shelters where new arrivals were initially
housed. By 2017, when Trump claimed that “crime in Germany is way up” because
it had taken in “all of those illegals”, the number of overall recorded crimes
was decreasing. Last year, crime in Germany sank to an 18-year low.
What about
the organised crime on Europe’s borders, where human traffickers prey on those
willing to risk it all in the hope of a better life? In a 2017 book on reforming
asylum policy, British economist Paul Collier argued that “while the industry
was already well-established in the Mediterranean, the massive rise in demand
triggered by the invitation from Germany further increased demand for smuggling
by criminal syndicates.”
Gerald
Knaus, chairman of the European Stability Initiative, a thinktank that advises
EU member-states on migration policy, disagrees vehemently: “The thesis that
Merkel created the refugee crisis was absurd in 2015, and it’s even more absurd
in retrospect,” he says.
Empirical
studies have failed to find data proving that Merkel’s Wir schaffen das
significantly intensified the movement of refugees into Europe, although it is
likely that the attention drawn towards Germany’s liberal stance on asylum influenced
the decisions of those who were already in Europe at the time.
“The
question is: what could she have done differently?” says Knaus. “Reintroduce
borders and try what France did after the Bataclan attacks in November 2015,
sending all irregular migrants back to Italy? That proved futile: France
received twice as many asylum applications in 2019 as in 2015. You can’t seal a
wide-open border with rhetoric and a few more border guards, while brutality
was fortunately ruled out in Germany.”
Germany’s stance
in 2015 did prove too optimistic in the sense that Merkel’s government seemed
to believe that the tumultuous events of that summer would lead to a quick
reform of the Dublin Regulation, the mechanism that determines which state is
responsible for examining an asylum application. Knaus says: “The Germans
thought everyone would sign up to a quota system because it was ‘fair’, but
they couldn’t explain how this would work in practice.”
Instead,
Merkel’s government took unilateral steps to slow down the rate of new arrivals
to a trickle. An agreement between Turkey and the EU to stop irregular
migration and replace it with a resettlement scheme, developed by Knaus’s
thinktank, drastically stemmed the flow of migrants to Europe in 2016. Merkel’s
government later limited asylum applications from north Africa by adding
Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia to its list of countries considered safe.
In March
this year, Germany launched a social media campaign to deter Syrian refugees
from embarking on a journey to central Europe, and Merkel’s “grand coalition”
with the centre-left Social Democratic party voted against taking in even just
5,000 vulnerable refugees stranded in Greek camps.
Merkel
never recanted her words of August 2015, as many even in her own party insisted
she should. But she did ensure a situation like the one that followed won’t be
repeated on German soil during her tenure.
Approval rating
On a
sweltering afternoon in Berlin’s suburban south, preparations are afoot for the
annual summer fete at the Marienfelde transit centre, a sprawling concrete camp
that used to be the first port of call for many East Germans who fled to the
west during the cold war, and now houses asylum seekers from around the world.
While volunteers erect socially distanced benches and hang up garlands in the
courtyard, a group of men and women from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq have
gathered inside to meet the Berlin senate’s integration officer, to ask for
advice and air grievances.
A
44-year-old Syrian is concerned that he might fail next month’s language exam,
even though he will need a pass in order to start working. German classes have
been cancelled because of the pandemic, and the wireless signal inside the camp
is too weak for online learning. “Berlin, on our doorstep, that is Europe,”
says the man, who doesn’t want to give his name for fear of getting into
trouble with the Syrian embassy. “But this shelter is like a little Syria:
everyone speaks Arabic.”
Germany was
not the destination of choice for the father of three, who arrived in the
country via the resettlement programme of the United Nations’ refugee agency,
the UNHCR, in 2018. He is grateful that Merkel’s government took him in, but
the wait for a work permit is starting to exasperate him. Before Berlin, he
worked for six years as a pastry chef in Izmit, Turkey, but German bakers won’t
accept his qualifications – he would need to do another two-year apprenticeship
first. “It’s very frustrating.”
It’s a success
story even if no one quite has the confidence to say it yet. Germany has
managed
Katarina Niewiedzial, integration officer
The
integration officer assures him she empathises with his plight: Katarina
Niewiedzial, who has been in the post since 2019, was once a migrant herself,
having arrived in Germany from Poland as a 12-year-old. She knows from personal
experience the areas of public life where Germany is ill-equipped for the task
of integrating newcomers.
German
employers are often still reluctant to recognise foreign qualifications. If
migrants lack the certificates to prove they are qualified enough to do a job,
they can apply to prove their skills in an interview, but they need fluent
German to do so – a bigger challenge for adults in their 40s than teenagers
like Hallak. Last year, the German Chamber of Commerce only carried out 80 such
“qualification analysis” processes in the whole of Germany.
Often
refugees end up in jobs they are overqualified for, such as catering, which in
turn are more precarious and have cut staff during the pandemic: in May this
year, the number of unemployed Berliners without a German passport was up by
40% compared to the same period in 2019.
Many
experts think that the integration classes that have been mandatory for
refugees in Germany since 2005 are no longer fit for purpose, holding back
those with academic qualifications while failing to offer real help for those
who arrive without being able to read or write. The percentage of those failing
the all-important B1 language test has risen rather than fallen over the last
five years. And yet, Niewiedzial is optimistic. “Germany can be a very sluggish
country, full of tiresome bureaucracy,” she says. “But it’s also able to learn
from its mistakes and draw consequences from them.”
Since 2015,
she says, the state had massively expanded its asylum authority, created
thousands of posts to coordinate volunteers, turned shelters into permanent
homes and trained specialist teachers. Germany has managed. “It’s a success
story, even if no one quite has the confidence to say that yet.”
Key dates
27 August
2015 71 migrants are found dead inside a refrigerated lorry abandoned in
Austria. The discovery sparks international revulsion, and contributes to the
decisions of several countries to open their borders to people fleeing war and
poverty.
31 August
2015 Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, says Wir schaffen das – We’ll manage
this – after visiting a camp for newly arrived refugees. Soon after she
announces an open-door policy; in the year that follows over a million people
claim asylum in Germany.
13 November
2015 The Bataclan attack in Paris is the first of a series of deadly attacks by
Isis-affiliated extremists across Europe. In July 2016 a Syrian who declared
his support for the group kills himself and injures 15 others with a homemade
bomb at a music festival in the German town of Ansbach. The far right uses the
attacks to argue against Merkel’s refugee policies.
March 2016
The EU strikes a deal with Turkey to return all refugees and migrants who reach
Europe across the Aegean sea. This dramatically reduces the number of people
arriving in Germany and other European countries to claim asylum.
19
September 2016 Merkel’s CDU party suffers a slump in support to just 18% in
Berlin state elections, while anti-immigration populists Alternative für
Deutschland (AfD) enters the German capital’s state parliament for the first
time. Mayor Michael Müller warns that the level of support it won “would be
seen around the world as a sign of the return of the rightwing and the Nazis in
Germany”.
19 December
2016 A Tunisian whose asylum application had been turned down rams a truck into
a crowded Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people and wounding 70. Isis
claims it inspired the attack.
24
September 2017 The populist radical-right AfD party enters the Bundestag, the
German parliament, as the third biggest party. After Merkel forms a coalition
with the Social Democrats, it becomes the largest opposition party.
October
2018 After crushing defeats in local elections, Merkel says she will step down
as CDU leader almost immediately, and will not contest the 2021 elections,
making her fourth term as Germany’s chancellor her last.
2020
Merkel’s effective handling of the coronavirus crisis helps restore her
popularity, particularly as the US and UK stumble. One poll finds over 80% of
Germans think she is doing her job “rather well”.
Emma Graham-Harrison
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