Hope and hate: how migrant influx has changed Germany

BERLIN

Men sit outside shisha bars, and women in hijabs push strollers past Middle Eastern restaurants and pastry shops in Berlin's Sonnenallee, a wide avenue that has become a symbol of how much Germany has changed in the last decade.

Many came during the huge migrant influx of 2015, when a million people arrived in a matter of months—mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

For barber Moustafa Mohmmad, 26, who fled the ruins of Syria's Aleppo, it is a home from home, "a kind of Arab street" where he can find sweets from Damascus and Aleppo-style barbecue.

To others it is a byword for integration gone wrong and disorienting change that has divided the country and helped make the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) the second biggest party.

"We can do this," Angela Merkel famously declared on Aug. 31, 2015, as columns of desperate people walked through the Balkans towards Germany.

Civil wars were raging in Syria and Afghanistan, driving the largest wave of refugees since World War II, with the Mediterranean Sea becoming a mass grave.

Four days later the then chancellor took the fateful decision to keep the Austria border open, eventually letting in more than one million asylum seekers.

German volunteers greeted trainloads of new arrivals with water and teddy bears, an outpouring of compassion that was too good to last.

Ten years on, many bitterly complain that services, from childcare to housing, have been stretched to breaking point.

Others point to the many migrant success stories, the joys of a more cosmopolitan country, and newcomers plugging gaps in the aging labor market.

But the country's current leader, Friedrich Merz, is not convinced, a view shared by a large majority of Germans, according to a Welt TV poll last week that found 71 percent felt Merkel was too optimistic.

Merz has lost little time undoing Merkel's legacy since coming to power in May. His coalition government has cracked down hard with stricter border controls, tougher residency and citizenship rules, and even deported migrants to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

He insists that strong measures are needed to halt the rise of the AfD and soothe fears inflamed by stabbings and car-ramming attacks blamed on migrants.

Asked recently about Merkel's declaration, Merz said Germany had "clearly not" managed "to do it." "We must control immigration. And we must ensure that those who come to us are well integrated."

Finding work

Germany is now home to more than 25 million people with a "migration background," meaning either they or their parents were born abroad—some 30 percent of the population. That includes more than a million with Syrian roots.

For most Syrians, work is more humdrum, with the majority working low-paid jobs in the service, construction, and health sectors.

Bonita Grupp has hired almost 70 migrants in her Trigema textile factory in the southern town of Burladingen, offering them housing, German lessons, and training.

"Germans simply don't apply for these positions anymore," she said.

Europe's biggest economy will need migrants more than ever in the years to come, with the German Economic Institute predicting a shortfall of around 768,000 skilled workers in the next two years.

Foreigners already account for 15 percent of healthcare professionals, according to the DKG hospital federation, with the largest number coming from Syria.

When right-wing politicians called for Syrians to go home when Bashar al-Assad's regime fell in December, the alarmed healthcare sector warned it couldn't do without its 5,000 or so Syrian doctors.

At one hospital in Quedlinburg in the central Harz mountains, 37 of the 100 doctors are migrants.

Nearly two-thirds of refugees who came in the 2015 wave had jobs by 2022, according to the latest data from the Institute for Employment Research (IAB).

But many migrants have yet to find work. They are four times more likely to be jobless than the rest of the population, with an unemployment rate of 28 percent last year.

Around 44 percent receive social benefits, according to the Federal Employment Agency—a key vector fueling resentment.

Much of the load falls on local councils that are already stretched. Salzgitter, a steel town south of Hanover that has seen better days, has taken in 10,000 migrants in a decade—a tenth of its population. Its mayor, Frank Klingebiel, complained to Merkel, his party leader, that the pressure on public services "could not go on like this."

In 2019, Salzgitter got 50 million euros that it used for two schools and three new nurseries, but Klingebiel said this was a "drop in the ocean."

The town now has four primary schools where more than 70 percent of pupils are migrants. Many do not speak German, which poses "exorbitant challenges," the mayor said.

The country's 2,500 mosques—long dominated by Turks—have also become more diverse, said Syrian imam Anas Abu Laban. In his little mosque in the northeastern town of Parchim, Koranic classes are in both German and Arabic, as young people born there tend to "understand German better."

To the AfD—and the fifth of voters who supported it in February's elections—Berlin's streets, crowded migrant shelters, and multiethnic classrooms are proof the country is doomed. The party now calls for the "remigration" of millions of foreigners.

This February's election was dominated by a bitter debate on migration amid a spate of knife and car-ramming attacks in which all the arrested suspects were asylum seekers.

Meanwhile, migrant numbers have also been dropping sharply as the debate has hardened.

Even before the latest restrictions, arrivals fell by 49.5 percent in the first half of this year, according to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees.

The crackdown has stoked fears and protests. Saeed Saeed, 25, a computer science student from Syria who now lives in Magdeburg, said he felt "unwanted in this country" at a protest in front of the Reichstag this summer.

Indeed, as many as one in four migrants are considering leaving Germany, according to a January study by the Institute for Employment Research; many are reportedly highly skilled.

They cited the political situation, high taxes, and bureaucracy among the reasons for their disillusion.

Only around 4,000 Syrians have decided to move back so far, according to research by public broadcaster ARD.

Asylum applications in Germany fell by almost 60 percent in August compared with the same month last year, interior ministry figures showed on Sept. 2.

A total of 7,803 people applied for asylum for the first time in August, compared with 18,427 last year, the ministry said, confirming figures first published by the Bild daily.

Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the figures were evidence that "our asylum policy change is working, our measures are successful."

From now on, he said, the political focus would be on "tightening up the common European asylum system in order to further reduce the pressure of migration on Europe."