Welcome to Germany
In 2014 Emad Kendakji’s hometown of Hama became a center of fighting between Syrian rebel and government forces, and he was terrified of being conscripted into the army. “I knew I had to fight or get out,” he recently told me. So, like many other Syrians, the twenty-eight-year-old law school graduate embarked on a perilous journey to Europe. He traveled across much of North Africa to Melilla, a Spanish territory on the Moroccan coast. The official at the Spanish refugee office, however, told him, “Just go to Germany. There is a better life and work there. We are poor.” He took the man’s advice and a few days later arrived in Düsseldorf. Kendakji was part of the socalled refugee wave of 2015 and 2016, when more than two million migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, and Eritrea, among other countries, made their way to Europe within a span of months. Driven by a confluence of events including the war in Syria, fallout from the Arab Spring, and worsening conditions in refugee camps in the Middle East, the mass migration prompted a crisis in Europe. Many countries refused to bear the burden of housing and feeding the new arrivals, producing bitter disagreement among European Union member states. According to the Pew Research Center, ultimately about 45 percent of the refugees ended up in Germany, which took in over 1.2 million of them, equivalent to 1.5 percent of the country’s population.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to allow the migrants in was initially greeted with widespread praise. It seemed to encourage a vision of a new, inclusive Germany and a burgeoning moral superpower, bolstering Merkel’s reputation as the “leader of the free world.” But it also drew scorn and schadenfreude from right-wing populists, who argued that it would lead to Germany’s social and economic ruin. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán later said, “If I would pursue a refugee policy like the chancellor, the people would chase me out of office the same day.” Just before his inauguration in early 2017, President-elect Trump said it was a “catastrophic mistake” for Merkel to have taken in “all of those illegals.”
Now, more than five years after the refugee crisis, the apocalyptic predictions have not materialized. According to numbers released last summer, the migrants from that period have integrated faster than previous refugee influxes. Approximately half of them have jobs, and another 50,000 are taking part in apprenticeship programs. The federal education minister has stated that more than 10,000 are enrolled in university. Three quarters of them now live in their own apartment or house and feel “welcome” or “very welcome” in Germany. The financial cost to the German government of taking in the migrants—including housing, food, and education—is likely to be recovered, in taxes, earlier than many had predicted.
But not all has gone well. Due to a scrambled deportation process, about 250,000 migrants without refugee status remain in the country in a state of limbo. Although some of the new arrivals have become doctors, students, and entrepreneurs, a significant number remain illiterate and unable to complete basic German-language courses. A disproportionate number of the newcomers are working jobs with few prospects for advancement, raising concerns that they may remain trapped in vulnerable economic conditions for the foreseeable future. Although over 80 percent of the migrants worked in skilled jobs before coming to Germany, only about half do so now, often taking jobs—as shelf-stockers, industrial help, or cleaning staff—that are unappealing to many Germans.
Kendakji now lives in Saarlouis, near the French border, and works as an HR adviser at TimePartner, one of Germany’s largest temp firms. He partly helps assign migrants to jobs for TimePartner’s clients, mainly manufacturers in need of unskilled labor. Kendakji estimates that he has placed two thousand refugees in temporary positions over the past three years, mostly in the industrial, storage, and food sectors. Temp firms like TimePartner, he said, are one of the best ways for migrants to enter the German workforce, because they allow newcomers to skip over the burdensome internship and certification process required for many jobs in Germany. “Many of the people we hire wouldn’t even get interviews at most companies,” he told me.
Kendakji, who has abandoned his hopes of working as a lawyer here because of the long path to getting his credentials recognized, said that many migrants have had to give up their loftier professional dreams. Recently, he told me, he tried to place a Syrian pharmacist in a job at a chocolate factory, but the man refused: “I tried to help him, but there was no point.” Kendakji noted that this shift to menial work is the price many have to pay for a life in Germany: “If I go back to Syria, they will immediately kill me.” To emphasize this, he ran a finger across his throat and laughed uncomfortably: “We need to work in any area we can, because we want to stay.”
During the refugee crisis, German authorities hoped to avoid the mistakes made during previous periods of increased immigration to the country. Between 1955 and 1973, 14 million Gastarbeiter, or guest workers, arrived in Germany, mostly from Southern Europe and Turkey. Because they were meant to leave the country after their contracts ended, they were not provided with language courses or other resources to help them fit in. Ultimately, three million of these workers remained, but many retreated into