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.
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.
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.