The Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan has raised concerns about the recurrence of the German refugee crisis in 2015, as the country is continuing to evacuate vulnerable Afghans and local staff. But according to academic circles and civil society, such concerns are unfounded. EURACTIV report in Germany.
“We will continue to do everything we can to help Afghans leave this country, especially those who stand on the side of Germany as a local power and work for a safe, free, and promising country,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in her The government statement said. Wednesday (August 25th).
So far, the German government has sent more than 4,600 people out of the country.
The day before, UN Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet warned that the Taliban now resort to mass executions of civilians.
Germany is accepting local employees stationed in Afghanistan, but also accepting people deemed to need special protection.
The Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer (Horst Seehofer) agreed with the federal states last week, stressing that there should be no caps on those who need protection. Seehofer added that Germany is “morally obliged” to do so.
The Ministry of the Interior told EURACTIV that people in need of special protection are a narrowly defined group and are considered to be particularly threatened, for example, because of their commitment to human rights.
This means that a large number of people who may be persecuted are still excluded from the reception plan.
Franziska Velma of Amnesty International told EURACTIV: “The EU and Germany now have a clear responsibility to evacuate those who might become targets of the Taliban in all ways.”
Velma added that what is needed is “to provide safe and legal channels for refugees from Afghanistan, such as resettlement programs, family reunification or humanitarian visas”.
The ghost of 2015
Germany’s caution is also partly due to fears that the large-scale refugee crisis in 2015 will repeat itself.
Several major politicians of the conservative CDU/CDU coalition-including CDU general secretary Paul Zimiak, CDU leader Alexander Dobrint, and the best of the trade union elections in September Candidate Armin Raschelt-warns against repeating Merkel’s “2015 mistakes” when she started her. Refugee open policy.
In an interview with Bild, Prime Minister of Bavaria and leader of the CSU, Marcus Soder talked about the possibility of a new “refugee wave” and emphasized that Germany should not experience “the second situation like 2015.”
However, as Franziska Velma of Amnesty International pointed out, the situation today is completely different. “The situation at the time cannot be repeated because the borders of the Balkans have been closed on a large scale since 2015,” explained Velma, referring to the so-called Balkan route for most refugees to Western Europe.
Sabrina Zajak, an immigration researcher at the German Research Center for Integration and Immigration (DeZIM), also believes this comparison is misleading because “the situation today is completely different from 2015”.
Zajak told EURACTIV that Germany is now better prepared to accept refugees-both at the level of civil society and in terms of improving accommodation and integration measures.
Integrate fear
In the weeks leading up to the German parliamentary elections on September 26, the integration of Afghans who have landed on German soil has been put on the political agenda.
The Minister of Integration, Annette Widmann-Mauz, told EURACTIV that what is important now is that “those who come to Germany can quickly obtain integration proposals and the municipality’s existing refugee support structure.”
In the case of Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, he refused to accept Afghan refugees on the grounds that he said it was “particularly difficult to integrate”.
However, according to statistics, the so-called difficulties faced by Afghans in integrating into society are largely fabricated. Afghans actually have a particularly high rate of success in the labor market. Migration monitor Found in German employment agency.
However, Germany has made some mistakes in the past, especially with regard to integration measures for Afghan refugees.
“For many years, Germany’s integration policy has put Afghan refugees at a disadvantage in obtaining integration support measures, because as a group, they have not had the so-called’good prospects for staying’ in recent years,” Immigration researcher Ramona German Integration and Immigration Riskke from the Research Center (DeZIM) told EURACTIV.
Many integration support programs are related to refugees’ “good residency prospects” and will only be issued when their protection rate exceeds 50%. However, the protection quota was determined only through the first-instance procedure, which is why the Afghan refugees are considered “low retention probability”.
However, the actual protection rate for Afghans is much higher because many affected people must first go to court to defend their asylum rights. In the end, the court ruled in favor of Afghan asylum seekers in three of the four cases.
“This sad state of affairs must be eliminated in order to provide the Afghan community with more opportunities for successful integration,” Amnesty International’s Verma emphasized.
Rischke warned that in addition, the asylum procedure for Afghan refugees takes a long time, which not only harms “human capital development and social participation”, but also leads to the deterioration of existing work-related skills through “inactivation”. .
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]
