On a recent blustery Sunday, I joined a tour group huddled by a schoolyard fence in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. A gust of wind pushed dead leaves across the basketball court as Ali, a Sudanese refugee, blew into his hands. He was showing us the Gerhart-Hauptmann School, an abandoned edifice from whose rooftop he had threatened to jump when, last summer, police tried to evict six hundred refugees who were living there. Ali continues to live at the school with twenty-three others; together with Mo, a guide from Somalia who was among the hundreds relocated from the school to a camp outside the city, he explained that the eviction effort had lasted more than nine days, involving more than seventeen hundred police officers and costing the city five million euros.
About a dozen of us were present outside the school, attracting uneasy glances from the security guards posted just inside the locked gate. We were participating in the inaugural outing of Refugee Voices, a donation-based “solidarity tour” that allows sympathetic locals and tourists a peek at Berlin’s subculture of asylum seekers and their allies. Other stops on our tour included Oranienplatz, a nearby square famous for activist gatherings, and Görlitzer Park, where young African refugees hang out and sell baggies of marijuana—for many newcomers the only work on offer. At each location, Ali and Mo shared stories of activism, police harassment, and efforts to study and find work. (All of the asylum seekers in this story asked to be identified only by their first names.)
Mo, a natural storyteller with an infectious laugh, described the journey he’d taken from Somalia to Germany four years ago, when he was twenty-six years old. He’d first left home to study business management at a Sudanese university, before finding a job as a manager at an oil company in Kuwait. When his visa expired, he was deported back to Somalia, where, he told me, members of Al Shabaab, Al Qaeda’s Somali affiliate, attempted to recruit him. “You can’t say no to these men,” he said. Mo’s family used their savings to send him to Syria. There, he paid a guide to lead him by foot across the mountains into Turkey. From Turkey, he was able to reach Athens, where he managed to board a plane to Germany using a Swedish passport he’d purchased for two thousand euros. His asylum status is still pending.
Refugee Voices is the brainchild of Lorna Cannon, a British tour guide and activist. She told me that it was designed to give refugees a way of working despite their legal ineligibility, to raise awareness of the diversity of experiences within the community, and to ease the path to integration for a few of the more than eight hundred thousand people who have, according to Frontex, the European Union border agency, entered the E.U. this year by “irregular” means. Many of those who have risked the illegal journey across the Mediterranean or up through Eastern Europe are young. More than half of the three hundred thousand current applicants for asylum status in Germany are under twenty-six years old, and eighty thousand are children.
There is an irony in this situation: Germany needs young workers. The combination of a low birth rate and high life expectancy has given the country one of the oldest populations in the world, rivaling Japan’s and Italy’s. Its population is also shrinking. Even accounting for the influx of recent years—at the end of 2014, half a million refugees, asylum seekers, and other stateless people were living in Germany, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency—the country will lose about five million people by 2050, Stephan Sievert, a researcher at the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, told me. “For the past few years we have been gaining people thanks to immigration, but soon we will start to shrink, and this will continue until mid-century,” Sievert said. “It’s going to become increasingly harder to make up for natural population loss, even with immigration, because of the growing gap between deaths and births.”
The median age of the German population is also expected to rise steadily, causing a skilled-labor shortage and rising social-security and health-care costs. “By 2050, the demographic of people of working age, between twenty and sixty-seven, is going to shrink by about eight million, even more than the total population loss,” Sievert said.
Ever since this problem was recognized, about a decade ago, economists in Germany have advocated a multipronged approach, one that includes better arrangements for working mothers, policies to encourage the elderly to prolong their working lives, and immigration. The refugees would seem to potentially be an important part of this solution. “Of course, the idea is to put them all to work, but the big question is how,” Sievert said. “We don’t yet know what kind of qualifications they have on average. Very little is known about the recent wave of immigrants and refugees.”
“But we agree that they need to make a living for themselves or there will be problems.”
Every refugee in Europe knows the pain of limbo. Applicants for asylum can spend months or years waiting to learn whether they will be permitted to stay in the country they’ve risked everything to reach. And until their cases are adjudicated, they have a hard time working or studying. Under E.U. regulations, if they were already registered and fingerprinted in another country, they may be unable to receive asylum benefits in Germany at all, and unable to apply legally for work, as well. Many end up living indefinitely in an assigned “lager,” or camp, which may lie far from social centers and places of business.
After the Refugee Voices tour, Ali told me that he had hoped, when he arrived in Germany, to find employment in a shipyard. He had tried unsuccessfully to pursue this line of work in Italy (where he was registered and fingerprinted) and, before that, in Libya. Instead, he found himself in a remote camp on the edge of Hamburg. He hated it. “You sit in the camp all day with nothing to do,” he said. Having abandoned the camp for Berlin, he was giving tours, marching with activists, and attending a volunteer-run German-language class four days a week. “You need to be with people, working and learning, or you turn to drugs and alcohol and become crazy or aggressive,” he told me. “The system here psychologically kills the refugee.” Even after three years in Germany, he said, “sometimes I think, ‘Why am I alive?’ I feel like I have no future.”
According to Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), the asylum-seeking procedure takes only five months, on average, before the government hands down an initial decision. For applicants from Somalia, the average is twelve months. “It depends on the state you’re coming from,” Surin Ersöz, a Berlin-based immigration lawyer, told me. “Syrians receive preferential treatment, for example, and people from the Balkans are treated the worst.” In general, applicants must prepare for a protracted struggle that necessitates costly legal counsel, she said, because although the initial decision may take as little as five months, most non-Syrian refugees are likely to be rejected the first time around. The subsequent appeals process can take up to three years. “We still have cases pending from 2012,” Ersöz said.
Virtually every refugee I spoke with was grateful to Germany for providing a safe harbor and some of the most generous financial support available in the E.U., including housing and a monthly stipend of around four hundred euros. But they wanted to work and study. Many came with college degrees or job experience from their home countries, and they were embarrassed to receive welfare from the German state. Even as many politicians have urged Chancellor Angela Merkel to curb the numbers of incoming refugees, state and federal bureaucrats are trying to implement programs that will expedite the integration process for those who want to work.
A month after my Refugee Voices tour, I visited the Federal Employment Agency in Berlin, where, since January, a pilot program called Early Intervention has ushered newly arrived asylum seekers into the labor market, regardless of their application’s status. “It’s very hard to find a job without assistance,” Franziska Hirschelmann, one of the agency’s job-placement officers, told me. “We get them started by helping them to find German-language courses, followed by training programs, internships, and job opportunities.”
The German government has relaxed the rules surrounding refugee labor in recent months, making this task easier. Currently, anyone can start looking for a job three months after submitting an asylum application, Hirschelmann said. If an asylum seeker finds work, she then appeals to the agency for a permit. But if the worker applied for asylum fewer than fifteen months ago the employer must then publicize the job opening and attempt to fill it with a higher-priority job seeker—i.e., a citizen of Germany or another E.U. country. If the position remains unstaffed after six weeks, the permit is granted, and the agency checks to insure that the salary and benefits are no different than for equivalent positions held by German citizens.
There are some occupations for which it is easy for refugees to find work: namely civil engineering, medicine, and nursing. Assuming applicants have the right training, certification, and language skills, they can usually start quickly. Otherwise, it can be difficult. Few employers are willing to risk hiring asylum seekers who may be deported in a year’s time. In some fields, like hospitality, it is virtually impossible to find an opening, on account of the surplus of qualified applicants among the existing German and E.U. pool.
While Hirschelmann and I were talking, a couple walked in for a meeting. The husband, Wissam, was a folk violinist from Sweida, a city in southwestern Syria. He was accompanied by his Lebanese wife, Zainab, who was eight months pregnant, and who did most of the talking. They had been in the country for less than two months and were anxious to start German-language classes as soon as the baby was born. Wissam then planned to look for training programs, possibly for driving or construction, and Zainab would start her own job search in a year or so.
“That’s good,” Hirschelmann told them. “It doesn’t help to sit around in the lager.”
Workers at the Federal Employment Agency hope that the Early Intervention program will expand in 2016 to address the influx of refugees and the growing demand for labor. (The agency estimates that Germany currently has about six hundred and twelve thousand job vacancies.) But state and federal programs still move glacially compared with the more informal networks of support that have emerged in recent months. In Berlin, Refugee Voices is one of several new organizations that aim to supplement state programs. Their ambitions range from simple cooking groups to job-portal Web sites and free professional-development courses. (In the magazine, Ian Parker recently described a scene at an American resettlement N.G.O.)
One of the most berlinisch of these initiatives is Refugees on Rails, a nonprofit positioned at the intersection of the city’s activist and tech-startup communities. Anne Kjaer Riechert, a founder of the organization, explained to me that she’d been inspired to start it while talking to a teen-aged Iraqi refugee with an I.T. background, who had been spending hours each day writing code at the library because he didn’t have a laptop of his own. Riechert soon collected about a hundred and fifty laptop donations from acquaintances in the tech world to distribute to needy coders. The group’s scope has since expanded to include three-month courses in the programming language Ruby on Rails, and to mentorship programs with local companies. Germany has forty-three thousand vacancies in I.T. alone, according to Bitkom, an umbrella organization for the German technology sector, and Riechert hopes some startups will look to asylum seekers to fill them. “I.T. needs talent, and refugees need jobs,” she said. “It’s a win-win.” But she admitted that the priority given to workers from Germany and the E.U. remains a sticking point.
More ambitious still is Kiron University, an unaccredited school founded in 2014, that is welcoming prospective students who can’t study at a conventional German college because they lack the necessary residency status or high-school qualifications. “Asylum limbo is the only requirement,” Markus Kreßler, a founder of Kiron, said. Through Kiron, students plan a course of study using free online classes offered by Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and other universities, while simultaneously working with volunteer mentors who are studying the same subject areas in Germany. If they’re successful in their asylum applications, participants can use credits from the online courses to enter a classical German university in their third and final year. Kiron also offers language courses, a lecture series, and a startup incubator. Mindful of Refugees on Rails, I asked Kreßler whether access to computers and the Internet presented a problem for students. “Actually, cold is the bigger problem,” he said. “Students write us and say they can’t study because it’s so cold in the camps.”
Thanks to federal, state, and grass-roots or volunteer-run programs, thousands of asylum seekers are now on their way to integrating into the German economy, but whether this can be accomplished on the scale of hundreds of thousands is another matter. The refugees represent the largest influx of potential labor to Germany since the nineteen-sixties and seventies, when a Turkish guest-worker program brought in millions of immigrants, many of whom settled down and raised families. For decades politicians resisted efforts to permanently integrate them, and today Turkish residents are more likely than other immigrant groups to be poorly educated, underpaid, and unemployed.
It is also unclear how Germans will respond to large-scale attempts to integrate refugees today. Two days after the tragic attacks in Paris in November, I asked Cannon, the founder of Refugee Voices, how things were going. Her answer was disquieting. The tours were increasingly popular, she said, but they were also starting to attract unsympathetic attendees. On the most recent outing, a man who was taking the tour had repeatedly harassed the guides with accusations about refugees gaming the system. Cannon wasn’t sure how to proceed. “The guys are in a vulnerable situation, talking about trauma they have experienced,” she said. “I just don’t want them to be exposed to people like that.”
