The mood has soured now, with parties across the political spectrum rushing to outbid one another on ways to curb irregular migration - ranging from cutting benefits to capping the number of people granted asylum.
Can't expect Germany to take on all of the asylum seekers. Gotta spread them out, concentrating any population of struggling people in one area always leads to problems.
I feel like a lot of the tension now is due to a failure of the system post arrival. Germany and Europe were good to open their doors to these refugees but they then failed to integrate them. There wasn’t enough support around cultural assimilation, language training, etc - they weren’t blended into our communities so much as allowed to set up parallel ones without any positive interaction. And the wound has just festered now.
Is it possible to successfully integrate that amount of refugees from such different cultural background in such short time?
Regarding language training - I'm not sure about Germany, but at least in Austria, where the symptoms of "failed integration" are also present (and also with right wing on the rise), you can get free A1+A2 courses and even B1 if you explain it right. When my wife was attending free A1 courses she learned that there were quite a few people who were attending same A1 courses year after year. You can bring the horse to water but you can't make it drink. So it's not right to blame the government only. There also needs to be a cultural shift, and things like that happen on scale of years, tens of.
BERLIN, Oct 6 (Reuters) - At the height of Europe's migrant crisis in 2015 Germany was heralded for its open-door policy, with images broadcast worldwide of citizens welcoming asylum seekers fleeing war and deprivation in the Middle East with flowers and donations.
Eight years later, however, the mood has soured, with parties across the political spectrum rushing to outbid one another on ways to curb irregular migration - ranging from cutting benefits to capping the number of people granted asylum.
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser urged Germany's 16 states on Wednesday to provide asylum seekers with material benefits rather than cash, to reduce the country's pull factor.
"The number of refugees trying to get to Germany is too high at the moment," Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Saturday, departing from predecessor Angela Merkel, whose declaration "Wir schaffen das" ("We can do this") became a mantra.
"There's a political consideration here with elections coming up, because right-wing parties may be able to use these irregular (migrant) movements to their advantage, gaining visibility and votes," said Alberto‑Horst Neidhardt, a migration specialist at the European Policy Centre think-tank.
Berlin has sought to stem the influx of irregular migration in various ways since 2015, for example by pushing for the EU deal with Turkey whereby Ankara stops people on its soil heading to the bloc in exchange for perks like financial aid, she said.
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The ad-hoc country of arrival system that has existed up to now isn't going to work much longer. With climate change headlines the way they have been the last few months how much longer before we start seeing millions of people moving from areas which are no longer inhabitable.
The present system is for someone to wait until they require asylum, then pay criminals to smuggle them to the wealthiest country they can afford to get to. It's senseless.
I recommend everyone check out the "immigration gumballs" video on YouTube or elsewhere. It is old and has been updated a few times. The fact is that mass migration to wealthy/developed countries is not a strategy to defeat global poverty (or many other problems). We are all better served to improve the countries of origin through technology, diplomacy, trade and economic development.
Greens now to the right Merkel on this. I'm making the Green-voting libs among my friends and family uncomfortable by pointing this out. The Greens have dropped every issue they ever pretended to care about. Main reason I hear for why people still want to vote for them is lesser-evil-ism or because they feel protective of them against far-right rhetoric. No matter that the Greens are also a nationalist, neoliberal, racist, imperialist, militarist, green-washed ghouls. Main difference between them and straight up conservatives is in rhetoric: the Greens will cry and moan about "having to do" this stuff, and how that's actually good for you. Except with the imperialism, they did the crying and moaning already during Kosovo, now they're on a straight up mission to spread freedom and democracy to the backwards people like they're channeling George W. Bush.