Mass Migration
Even as some countries like Denmark greet refugees, an ugly backlash is apparent
Last in a series: Fears grow that large numbers of refugees will spark backlash in host countries,
In the largest mass movement of humanity in almost a century, people fleeing war and poverty are abandoning their homes and flowing west by the tens of thousands, risking arrest and death at sea to reach safety.
Riley Sparks followed the refugees along the journey to Europe. FLENSBURG, GERMANY— On a railway platform in a small German town mostly visited by Danes looking for cheap liquor and chocolate, dozens of people sat on a grey, damp Monday, waiting to welcome a train loaded with exhausted refugees.
“I have been in pain, and I want to help everyone else who is in pain,” said Maysam Ghannam, a 28-yearold lawyer from Aleppo, Syria, who was among volunteers working at the station on Monday.
Unlike most of the Syrian refugees who have come to Germany this year, Ghannam flew from Athens to Hamburg on a Syrian passport after leaving his home in May.
He lived on the regime-controlled side of Aleppo — the safer side, to the extent that that can be said of anywhere there — but, like many young Syrian men, he fled the country to avoid conscription.
“I don’t want to take up arms against any person,” he said.
Now living in a town near Flensburg, Ghannam has been coming back to the train station to help translate and give information to refugees in the border town.
“All of these people, they are brothers,” he said, looking at the Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans filling the small-town railway station. Volunteers speaking German, Danish, English and a half-dozen other languages handed out food, water and clothing to refugees arriving on the trains: about 50 peo- ple every hour.
In Germany, Munich saw at least 13,000 refugees on Sunday alone: the most this country has received in a single day since refugees began arriving in large numbers earlier this year. Many continued on to Denmark and Sweden.
Over the weekend, Germany’s foreign minister announced that the country would reintroduce border controls in Bavaria, hoping to block refugees arriving from Austria. Max Wichmann, a 20-year-old student who was helping at the Flensburg train station on Monday, said he worried the huge numbers of refugees would provoke a rightwing, anti-immigrant reaction.
“We’re taking a lot of people, which is good. But there are a lot of parts of society that are not ready for this,” said Wichmann.
“There is racism, hidden. It’s not visible, but it’s hidden in many parts of society,” he said. “You’ll often hear sentences like, ‘I have no problem with refugees, but . . .’”
At least 5,000 refugees arrived in Denmark last week, most of them through the Flensburg station.
In response, the Danish government has cancelled direct rail links with Germany and closed the country’s borders several times over the past week. Police were searching trains as they passed through Padborg, north of the German border.
Denmark took in almost 20,000 refugees fleeing conflict in the Balkans in the early 1990s, noted Gesper Skovbo, a 19-year-old student taking the train back to Aarhus, Denmark.
“This is just a fraction of that,” he said. But apart from the logistics of receiving so many people at once, many politicians in Denmark have said they are concerned about how the small country will integrate thousands of new immigrants.
The anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party, which won the secondlargest share of seats in the parliament this summer, last week published ads in Lebanese newspapers that were aimed to discourage refugees from coming to Denmark.
Last week, many Danish newspapers printed a photo of a man leaning off a highway overpass near Padborg, across the border from Flensburg, and spitting on refugees walking on the highway below.
Some 30,000 people protested in Copenhagen on the weekend, asking the government to take in more refugees. Many others risked smuggling charges to drive people to the Swedish border when Denmark refused to allow trains to continue through the country.
“There’s a lot of ambivalence about (the issue of immigration), and this case,” Skovbo said. “Some people are going into a kind of defence mode.”