From our Who scratched my rose colored glasses series.
This post began with a simple: how many refugees will 'my' county have to take in? The answer to this was astoundingly easy. Getting solid numbers is often difficult in Germany unless official statistics record them. Refugee-wise, we are in luck. The county has upwards of 100 000 inhabitants, and recent newspaper reports said that the take in for the year will be around 800, less than 1% of the population, 1 in 100.
For a couple of months or so in the summer of 2015, the world media looked at Germany taking in higher than ever numbers of refugees in a somewhat orderly manner.
Reactions were often characterized by admiration, often by bewilderment. There were those who said it will all change if the numbers don't decrease, and they probably feel the sweet sense of confirmation as the cold season is coming and latest opinion polls show a majority of Germans "worry" about the influx.
Well, you have to understand, they are coming in huge numbers, that initial "argument" didn't quite hold water when some pointed out that 1 in 5 people in Lebanon are refugees, the raw number standing at about 1.2 million.
That's more, or pessimistically about the same number, than are coming to the European Union, which has over 500 million residents.
The next argument was Germany simply didn't have the resources. But - darn it - citizens helped so much that the police in Munich had to tell them to stop bringing food, clothes, and other goods.
Trying to focus on people traffickers didn't help when the photo of a dead three year old swept the internet.
With the simple figures in tatters, Hungary did the anti-refugee people a favor, it built a fence and brought its numbers down. A mere few weeks after that, Germany's largest police union called for a fence to Austria.
25 years after the Iron Curtain came down, Germans call for a fence.
The latest approach does seem to work: the "worries" (unspecified) combined with an actual increase in violence against refugees (arson and physical attacks) plus the steady repetition of "the law is the law" and "other countries are not pulling their weight" are finally giving the conservative right the upper hand.
Throughout all of this, the world never really stopped to recall that discrimination of its existing immigrant population has had a long tradition in Germany.
It took decades until the glossy story of how well post WWII Germany treated and integrated its own German refugees finally got an official reality check. These people were not even Muslim but true blue Christians.
Many who fled East Germany were treated just as badly. And in the early 1960s, the Social Democrat (aka "liberal") chief of Germany's biggest asylum seeker processing camp complained that almost 100% of arrivals were criminals.
What he 'forgot' to mention was that crossing the border illegally was a felony, and that it was this act that earned the asylum seekers the label "criminals", not any actual criminal history.
The first generation of "guest workers" in the 1960s/70s was not treated well, and their children and grandchildren face discrimination to this day. This Spiegel article from 2014 reads Discrimination by first name: Nobody wants an Ali on the team. People from Muslim countries have had the worst experiences for the past 50 years, including the arbitrary barrier of a German language test prior to being able to move wife and kids from Turkey.
Discrimination by last name? Of course, and just today someone told us that a family member had changed his last name to something German.
Why, do you think, are the German authorities pleading for housing space for the new refugees in a country that has 1.7 million vacant housing units? Yes, a large number of these units are in the more depressed areas of Eastern Germany, and the big cities have a general shortage.
But this is not the whole story.
A lot of landlords will simply not rent to Muslim/Arab/African foreigners. Sure, show up with a nice white Anglo name, and you'll be fine.
And speaking of Anglo: American citizens moving to Germany with their spouse do not have to pass a language test first.
We checked the rental offerings and the 'seeking apartment' ads in our county for a while and came to the conclusion that the space it there. About one week's worth of offers would more or less cover the 800.
Why is it not happening?
A neighbor told us almost two years ago: Mrs. X has an empty apartment, and her Turkish neighbors asked if their daughter could rent it. X doesn't like Turks, she told them she had no plans to rent the place out in the foreseeable future.
That apartment is still vacant. Two more vacancies have opened in the building, the last one over six months ago.
None are filled to date. **
Many foreigners have made Germany their home, but outside of cities with a very high proportion of second or third generation immigrants, even finding a place to live is often a challenge.
Add to that odd regulations, such as a 50 sqm minimum living space for a foreigner (plus 20 for any additional adult in case of families) and compare this to the standard student housing dorm room: 16 sqm for an individual.
Oh, and about foreigners and crime: rates are not higher, but immigrants get arrested more often than their German counterparts.
Last but not least, there continues to exist some German on German discrimination - your regional accent is enough to make you a second class person in places. And age limits for jobs are still wide spread contrary to need or evidence - a leftover from the days when eugenics was all the rage.
A German-American lawyer with many years of experience in civil law recently laid out discrimination in the US versus Germany and came to an interesting conclusion: in the US, laws are the primary means of protection, while German laws protect you less against discrimination and have gaping holes. But other legal provisions give some added protection, for example, while you may have more difficulty getting housing in Germany, renter protection is still stronger than in the United States.
In the end, it's pretty simple. As we said in the previous post The bias of "really great": a shuttle driver, a country, don't overly romanticize any country, whether it is Germany or Mongolia, the US or Russia.
[Update 1/10/2016] Fixed a couple of typos.
** [Update 3/29/2016] The two apartments are now rented out. To Germans.
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