WORK
What Is Going Well

Of the refugees aged between 15 and 64 who arrived in the country in 2015, 10 percent of them had found jobs by the second half of 2016. That may not sound like much, but most refugees must first learn German or receive additional vocational training before they can begin looking for work.


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As such, forecasts for 2017 and beyond look better. The Institute for Employment Research (IAB), which does research on behalf of Germany's Federal Employment Agency, believes it is possible that every second refugee will have a job within five years, assuming that paid internships and low-paying part-time jobs are also included. The reason behind the optimism is provided by a representative survey among 4,800 refugees. It found that 22 percent of those who came in 2014 are employed as are 31 percent of 2013 arrivals.

A number of initiatives have been established to ensure that the positive trend continues. In 2016, the German Chambers of Commerce and Industry (DIHK) invested 20 million euros in projects aiding refugees and plans to provide 15 million more this year.

What Isn't Going Well

German business leaders have complained that German officialdom has not made it easy for them to hire refugees. Asylum applications take too long to process, language courses often have waiting lists and companies face unnecessary bureaucracy, laments a DIHK statement.

Furthermore, many companies are concerned that investments in young migrants from Afghanistan or Albania will be wasted should they ultimately be deported. The 2016 Integration Act grants migrants whose asylum applications have been rejected -- but who have been issued with temporary papers preventing their deportation -- residency for the duration of their vocational training programs. But, as the DIHK complains, officials have "broad discretion" to override that provision.

Disillusionment has also been spreading when it comes to Germany's lack of skilled workers. According to the consultancy firm Ernst & Young, 78 percent of German companies complain of having trouble finding qualified personnel. Hopes that this gap might be filled with specialists from Syria have not been met.

Only 58 percent of refugees 18 and older even have a school diploma, according to the IAB survey. But even those who are qualified don't automatically find a job that fits their skills. When it comes to technical careers, the demands are often so specific that even engineers have a hard time finding employment.


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The case of Syrian refugee Nael Samman, 35, provides a telling example. Prior to the Syrian civil war, Samman studied electrical power engineering, before coming to Germany in 2014. His family has enough money for him to study management at a private university near Mainz and he has since completed his master's in business administration. Although he was on a student visa during his studies, he now has refugee status and is looking for a job.

"I thought that people like me were needed here," he says. In the last two years, Samman has sent out a number of applications to companies like BASF, Bayer and ThyssenKrupp. Indeed, he has tried his luck at almost all companies listed on the DAX, Germany's blue chip stock index. In response, he has received form letters encouraging him to continue applying. "It is incredibly frustrating," Samman says. "I feel like I am being discriminated against." He has now begun wondering if applicants with Arabic names generally have a more difficult time finding jobs than others. And whether many companies shy away from hiring refugees due to the increased amount of paperwork associated with employing them.

SCHOOLING
What Is Going Well

Guiding hundreds of thousands of underage migrants to the successful completion of a school diploma is itself a monumental task. But most German states have been able to find enough teachers for preparatory classes in which children learn German before joining regular classes. Baden-Württemberg, for example, hired 1,160 additional teachers, Hesse 2,000 and North Rhine-Westphalia 1,200. Often, teachers without official credentials have been sent into the classroom due to the lack of trained instructors.

In many schools in large German cities, the percentage of children from migrant families was already high - which doesn't automatically mean that the more recent influx created problems. In a primary school in the immigrant neighborhood of Tenever in Bremen, for example, 95 percent of the children come from immigrant families. The school has 30 years of experience when it comes to integrating the children of immigrants into the general school population and has been offering preparatory language courses since 2002. "Refugee children aren't a problem for us. They are just an additional subgroup in our already extremely diverse student body," says school principal Isolde Mörk. "Thus far, all of them have settled in nicely."

What Isn't Going Well

Many children who are still living in emergency shelters or initial reception facilities have to wait extended periods before beginning their schooling in the public-school system. In some states, compulsory schooling only applies once families move out of interim shelters into more permanent housing. According to asylum laws, refugees should stay in initial reception facilities for a maximum of six months, but longer stays are not always avoidable.

According to a UNICEF study, almost half of staff members questioned at initial reception facilities said that children in their shelters only receive instruction "internally or within the framework of language courses." Twenty percent said that children in their care received no schooling at all.


HAVE WE DONE IT?

In 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel famously proclaimed: "We can do it!" - a sentence intended to allay the fears of her fellow Germans. One-and-a-half years after the refugee-crisis year of 2015, the situation on Germany's borders has normalized. From January through March, BAMF only registered 55,000 new asylum applicants, compared to 175,000 applications filed during the same period in 2016.

This drop has given officials the breathing space needed to focus on apartments, jobs and German classes. But it isn't easy to determine the degree to which this breathing space is being capitalized on because the statistics available are incomplete in many areas. Germany's federal system is particularly well suited to the obscuring of problems and the federal government hasn't thus far shown much élan when it comes to improving information gathering: There is no central clearing house for data from Germany's 16 states and 11,000 municipalities. The country doesn't even know how many refugees left Germany to return home last year, with reliable statistics pertaining only to the 25,000 who were deported. Many more voluntarily returned home, some of them with financial support from German agencies, but there are no reliable numbers pertaining to such departures. A survey of state agencies undertaken by SPIEGEL found that the number of voluntary returnees last year was at least 80,000.




Many statistics are difficult to compare because terms are different from state to state. The situation is particularly impenetrable when it comes to education, which is in state hands, and municipality-run refugee hostels. How many refugee children in Germany are living in initial reception facilities and not going to school? How many have already joined regular classes with German children? In which regions are teachers and social workers in particular need of help? Answers to those questions can only be obtained through estimates and the individual opinions of experts.

The German government plans to invest a further 14 billion euros this year in the housing, provisioning and integration of refugees. It is a lot of money - and it would be advantageous to know how best to spend it.


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(By Susan Djahangard, Katrin Elger, Christina Elmer, Miriam Olbrisch, Jonas Schaible, Mirjam Schlossarek and Nico Schmidt)


(source: http://www.spiegel.de/international/...a-1147053.html )