#refugees in germany

[thatswhywelovegermany]

Persons seeking protection in Germany

About 3.1 million persons are currently living in Germany because they are seeking protection.

1.3 million (42 %) of them have asylum protection and refugee protection (protection from political persecution) based on the German constitution ("Those who are politically persecuted enjoy asylum.") and subordinate laws, subsidiary protection (e.g. from civil war) or deportation bans

1.1 million (35 %) fall under the special regulation for Ukraine refugees, a residence permit without asylum procedure

291.1 thousand (9 %) enjoy other reasons such as special deals with other states or a status as a professional expert.

276.5 thousand (9 %) are waiting for a decision on their asylum application

169.9 thousand (5 %) are obliged to leave the country because their asylum request was rejected, but most are tolerated and are not deported, e.g. because of family or missing documents

[rightnewshindi]

रिफ्यूजियों ने अरविंद केजरीवाल के घर के सामने दिया धरना, मुख्यमंत्री ने पूछा, पाकिस्तानियों को इतना सम्मान क्यों

रिफ्यूजियों ने अरविंद केजरीवाल के घर के सामने दिया धरना, मुख्यमंत्री ने पूछा, पाकिस्तानियों को इतना सम्मान क्यों

Delhi News: पाकिस्तान से आए शरणार्थियों ने गुरुवार को दिल्ली के मुख्यमंत्री अरविंद केजरीवाल के घर के बाहर जमकर विरोध प्रदर्शन किया. प्रदर्शन के दौरान शरणार्थियों ने खूब नारेबाजी भी की. शरणार्थियों का कहना है कि केजरीवाल ने CAA कानून के खिलाफ भ्रामक बयान दिया है, इसके लिए वे माफी मांगे. अपने घर के बाहर इस प्रदर्शन को देखकर केजरीवाल ने मोदी सरकार पर हमला बोला है. केजरीवाल ने सोशल मीडिया एक्स (X)…

[menalez]

on refugees in europe

this post feels necessary because of how pervasive far-right populist rhetoric is, including in supposed “radical feminist” spaces, where such rhetoric is becoming more and more normalised in the name of “protecting european women”. these posts include a lot of misinformation about the reality of refugees. i will preface this by saying i am a woman of colour, an immigrant, and live in germany. for work, i help traumatised refugees receive psychological support. this means in more ways than one, i am quite familiar with refugees in germany. 

plenty of people seem to be under the impression that being a refugee is easy, that they’re just “illegal immigrants” too lazy to fix issues in their countries. this is false. refugees are overwhelmingly people being specifically targeted *for trying to fix the oppression in their nations*. an overwhelming portion of the refugees i have worked with were political prisoners, meaning they were active in opposition political parties or actively speaking against their governments. as a result, many have experienced torture, sexual violence, police brutality, and have felt their lives were under threat. after facing immense trauma and danger, they had to flee to preserve their lives. that’s part of what being a refugee means. 

another bit of misinformation is the implication that refugees are just “illegal immigrants” with “nothing to lose”. this is also false. refugees flee their countries because they face imminent danger. many of them, if deported to their countries, are bound to be killed. refugees without stable status in germany live in constant fear of their claim to asylum being rejected, because of the fear of being killed in their home countries. this means that to be deported from germany is to potentially lose the one thing no one can afford to lose: their lives. so no, refugees aren’t people with nothing to lose. they’re people who have already lost a lot and are afraid of losing even more. moreover, they’re not in the country illegally, they have their fingerprints taken and have heavy restrictions placed onto them by the government. they undergo a pretty tiresome, thorough legal process and often require lawyers to represent them. this process takes months, sometimes even longer than a year. their application being accepted does not mean their status in germany is safe for good, either.

i’ve also seen someone call refugees “illegal economic migrants”… also a myth. many refugees actually lived more luxuriously in their home-countries. sure, some lived in extreme poverty, but a significant amount say openly that they wish they could go back to their country. they say that they lived in a bigger home, and lived more comfortably, before having to flee for whatever reason. this is not the reality of economic migrants, who leave their countries to live in a country where they can have a better class status and earn more. there is no economic incentive for the majority of refugees. there is no secret luxuries to being a refugee.

claims that refugees are “undocumented”: untrue. as mentioned before, their fingerprints are taken. they are thoroughly investigated. many, even if their case is legitimate, have their claim to asylum rejected initially and then have to combat that. sometimes nothing works and they do have to be sent back to their countries, and potentially are killed once sent back. 

another false belief is the idea that it’s very easy to be a refugee and anyone can just claim to be a refugee and then be allowed to stay in a european country, no questions asked. even in germany, one of the better countries to refugees, this is not the case. for example, 50-66% of refugees from iraq had their application rejected. in germany, you can appeal this decision, but most appeals are rejected, too. the people who receive the highest percentage of positive responses to their claims to asylum are syrians (0.1% rejection rate in 2023), afghans (1.0% rejection rate in 2023), and somalis (5-6% rejection rate in 2023). i hope it goes without saying why that is the case. IF their application is accepted, they receive a residence permit that is valid for 1-3 years (depending) and their stay is evaluated again upon the expiry of their residence permit. if their country is deemed safe enough to be sent back to, they lose the right to stay in germany. if, before coming to germany, their fingerprints were taken in another EU country, they are likely to be deported to that country even if that country will inevitably deport them back to their country. 

there are many more false claims i’ve seen spread in “feminist” spaces, but the point of this post is: please stop blindly believing misinformation. please educate yourselves on what a refugee is and the actual process of asylum applications in the EU. if you’re european, maybe go outside more and try to volunteer somewhere to personally get to know some refugees. they are just human beings, like you and i. just because their skin colour is more likely to be brown does not mean they are walking caricatures of a disney villain. 

[mapsontheweb]

Map of the German occupation zones, new Polish borders and the displaced persons/refugees after WW2

[africanrefugeeswelcome]

Refugees Welcome = Increase in the birth rate in declining countries with a serious demographic crisis. Thank you African men for saving us!

[uncanny-tranny]

Big reminder that your country is not immune to bigotry. I've seen so many people, for example, pretend like antisemitism doesn't exist in the USA because we were part of the allied forces in WWII (of course, they conveniently don't remember that we rejected jewish refugees when WWII broke out and we only really joined because Pearl Harbor was bombed, but I digress).

If you think your country is immune from antisemitism, racism (including anti-Indigenous racism), class issues, ableism, whatever else it may be, look deeper because you will find it.

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

Ukrainian refugees work as shoemakers in a displacement camp in Germany after World War II.

Millions of Ukrainians were taken by the Nazis as slaves during the war, and hundreds of thousands were left stateless as their land was absorbed into the Soviet Union.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Tim Ganser at The UnPopulist:

Since the end of World War II, Germans had by and large steadfastly resisted voting for far-right populists. That norm was shattered in the last decade by the success of the political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which seemed to gain more traction as it radicalized into a full-blown, hard right populist party. A year into its existence, spurred by widespread discontent with German fiscal policy, the AfD won seven seats in European Parliament. In 2017, after undergoing a hard-right turn, it won 94 seats in the German federal elections, good for third place overall. For the past year, the AfD has consistently ranked second in Politico’s poll aggregator tracking the public’s voting intentions.

In this Sunday’s European Parliament elections, roughly 1 in 6 German voters is expected to cast a ballot for the AfD, whose members have trivialized the Holocaust, encouraged their followers to chant Nazi slogans, and participated in a secret conference where they fantasized about forced deportations of naturalized citizens they derisively call “Passport Germans.” Worse still, the AfD is predicted to be the strongest party, with up to a third of the vote share, in the three elections for state parliament in Saxony and Thuringia on Sept. 1 and in Brandenburg on Sept. 22. And in generic polls for a hypothetical federal election, the AfD fares even better than it did in any previous election. How did Germany get to this point?

The AfD’s Origin Story

The AfD was founded in early 2013 by a group of conservatives, led by the economics professor, Bernd Lucke, greatly disillusioned with then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s fiscal policy. In their view, the European debt crisis had revealed deep instability within the eurozone project as smaller nations found themselves unable to cope with the economic demands of membership, and they believed Merkel’s focus on saving the euro was coming at the expense of German economic interests. This was, however, the opposite of a populist complaint—in fact, the AfD was initially referred to as a “Professorenpartei” (a professor’s party) because of the party’s early support from various economics professors who were more interested in fiscal policy than catering to popular will. In its earliest days, the AfD could best be characterized as a cranky but respectable party of fiscal hardliners. Its anti-establishment posture stemmed entirely from its belief in the necessity of austerity. Even its name could be construed less as nationalistic and more an answer to the dictum coined by Merkel—“alternativlose Politik” (policy for which there is no alternative)—to defend her bailouts during the eurozone crisis.

Although the AfD had launched an abstract economic critique of Merkel’s policies that could be hard to parse for non-experts, its contrarian stance resonated with a significant portion of Germans. Right out of the gate, the AfD obtained the highest vote share of any new party since 1953, nearly clearing the 5% threshold for inclusion in the Bundestag, Germany’s Parliament, in its first electoral go round. Its success was also measurable in terms of membership, passing the 10,000 mark almost immediately after its formation. The rapid increase in membership, however, helped lay the groundwork for its turn toward right-wing populism. Perhaps due to pure negligence—or a combination of calculation and ambition—the party’s founders did little to stop right-wing populists from swelling its rolls. And as the German economy emerged through the European debt crisis in good financial shape, fiscal conservatism naturally faded from the public’s consciousness. However, a new European crisis having to do with migrants came to dominate the popular imagination. The AfD hardliners seized on the growing anti-migrant opinion, positioning the AfD as its champion, thereby cementing the party’s turn towards culture war issues like immigration and national identity.

Starting in late 2014, organized right-wing protesters took to the streets to loudly rail against Germany’s decision to admit Muslim migrants, many fleeing the Syrian civil war. The AfD right wing’s desire to become the political home of nativism led to a rift within the party that culminated in founder Bernd Lucke’s being ousted as leader in 2015, and his replacement with hardliner Frauke Petry. Lucke left the party entirely, citing its right-wing shift, following in the footsteps of what other party leaders had already done and more would do in the coming year. Up until this point, the AfD unwittingly helped the cause of right-wing populism. If the reactionary far-right had tried to start a party from scratch, it would have likely failed. The AfD, after all, was created within a respectable mold, trading on the credentials of its earliest founders and leaders. But with saner voices now pushed out, right-wing populists had the party with public respectability and an established name all to themselves. And they deliberately turned it into a Trojan horse for reactionary leaders who wanted to “fight the system from within.

[...]

A New Normal in Germany

As right-wing populist positions have become part of the political discourse, Germany is now in the exact same position as some of its European neighbors with established hardline populist parties. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni ascended to the premiership in October 2022 as the head of her neo-fascist Fratelli d’Italia party, which is poised to perform well in the upcoming European Parliament elections. In France, the Marine Le Pen-led far-right Rassemblement National (RN) is set to bag a third of votes in those elections, roughly double what President Macron’s governing coalition is expected to obtain.

What makes the situation in Germany especially worrisome is that, unlike in France and Italy, far-right parties had failed to garner any meaningful vote share in nationwide elections until just seven years ago; indeed, until the 2017 federal election, there had never been a right-wing populist party that had received more than six percent of the national vote in Germany. The nation’s special vigilance toward far right ethnonationalism in light of its history of Nazi atrocities was expected to spare Germany the resurgence of far-right populism. But it actually led to complacency among mainstream parties. By 2017, the AfD—already in its right-wing populist phase—received nearly 13% of the vote in the federal election to become the third-strongest parliamentary entity. And by then it had also made inroads in all state parliaments as well as the European Parliament. The norm against it was officially gone.

To be sure, the AfD is not on track to take over German politics. It currently has the fifth most seats among all German parties in the Bundestag, fourth most seats among German parties in the European Parliament, and is a distant eighth in party membership. Nor is it currently a threat to dominate European politics—late last month, the AfD was ousted from the Marine Le Pen-led Identity and Democracy (ID) party coalition, the most right-wing group in the European Parliament. Le Pen, herself a far-right radical, explained the AfD’s expulsion by describing the party as “clearly controlled by radical groups.” But none of the above offer good grounds for thinking the AfD will be relegated to the fringes of German or European politics.

After the election, the AfD could rejoin ID, or it could form a new, even more radical right-wing presence within the European Parliament. Some fear that the AfD could potentially join forces with Bulgaria’s ultranationalist Vazrazhdane. Its leader, Kostadin Kostadinov, said that AfD’s expulsion from ID could create an opening to form “a real conservative and sovereigntist group in the European Parliament.” Also, ID’s removal of the AfD wasn’t due to its stated policy platform being out of step with Europe’s right-wing populist project. Rather, it was because the AfD’s leading candidate, Maximillian Krah, was implicated in a corruption and spying scandal involving China and Russia, and because he said he would not automatically construe a member of the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) to be a criminal. Absent these entirely preventable missteps, the AfD would be in good standing with right-wing populist partners in Europe.

Seeing far-right Nazi-esque Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) rise in prominence in Germany is a sad sight.

[zatdummesmadchen]

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-escape-gaza-a-mothers-plea-for-safety

Dear friends and supporters,

My name is Nada, and I am reaching out to you with a heavy heart and a sense of urgency. 

Here in Gaza, there is a small tent standing alone in the corner of a refugee camp. Inside it, I sit with my young children, trying to protect them in every way possible and provide them with comfort and safety despite the hardships.

My children and I are now in great danger and need your help to evacuate from Gaza to safety. The situation worsens every day with limited access to drinking water, food, and medicine, along with facing the horrors of war. 

The war has swept away our homes and dreams, and now we live in a tent, surrounded by hunger, fear, and diseases. My youngest son suffers from hepatitis due to pollution and lack of healthcare.

The days pass very slowly, and the situation deteriorates further each day. The need for food, medicine, water, shelter, and safety has become nearly impossible.

I have launched a fundraising campaign to facilitate our evacuation to Egypt and to start our lives anew. The ticket price to enter Egypt is $5,000 for each adult and $2,500 for children.

Your contribution, no matter how big or small, will make a significant difference in our lives and give us a chance for a brighter future. With your donation, you can be the light that illuminates our lives.

Please save my children; I do not want them to die in Gaza. If I cannot survive, please do not forget them. Protect them after I am gone.🙏🏼❤️

🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉

ONCE AGAIN HELLO EVERYONE AND WE NEED HELP !!!

Please consider reblogging and donate what you can to help someone in need !!!

🔻🔻🔻

REMEMBER EVERY SMALL ACTION COUNTS !!!

🫒

Tag chain ⛓️ [please keep it going guys] : @battlebabebeulah @nomoresympathy-eh @lemedstudent2021 @abla-soso @timetravellingkitty @importals99 @redpinejo @kuch-toh-garbad-hai-daya @curtwilde @germany-is-straight @attractivesteaminghunkofflesh69

[featherymainffins]

What the fuck man

[soryualeksi]

The first German media is carefully starting to report on our Foreign Minister "warning against" the absolute bloodbath "humanitarian challenge" of an all-out Israeli attack on the refugees in Rafah.

And I found myself baring my teeth against the radio like a weirdo because I can't contain my disgust and fury.

You.

Were all cheering this on UNTIL NOW.

You.

Were persecuting anyone who raised the alarm about the ON-GOING humanitarian catastrophe as an "antisemitic terrorism supporter". People lost JOBS. People lost social standing. PEOPLE WERE SUED.

Everyone with a human heart WAS SCREAMING ABOUT THIS FOR FOUR MONTHS but you were too fucking racist and arrogant to listen, because "who can trust these Muslims and anyone who lets themselves by MANIPULATED by them amirite".

And NOW that 30 THOUSAND bodies are counted and MANY will follow, NOW that EXACTLY WHAT PEOPLE SAID WOULD HAPPEN IN RAFAH IS HAPPENING.

Now you're getting scared because those people who kept screaming about human rights might ACTUALLY have been onto something, and you're seeing yourself unable to wiggle out of the fact that YOU TOO cheered on this ethnic cleansing, you see yourself in some DEEP SHIT of I don't fucking care "public opinion" or something, because CERTAIN AS HELL IT'S NOT SUDDENLY GROWING A CONSCIENCE.

And now you try to fucking quickly get up some "plausible deniability" defence, so that you might be protected from the full brunt of "The world is watching the targeted massacre of refugees on livestream and YOU personally told the perpetrators that it's fine, go ahead, no red lines, do as you wish because PER DEFINITION your ends are pure of heart and justify ANY means physically possible" UNTIL THIS FUCKING MOMENT WHEN IT BECAME TOO OBVIOUS TO FURTHER DENY REALITY.

I fucking hate everyone.

I hope their stories haunt you to the end of your days, awake and asleep.

Germany is complicit and was ENTHUSIASTICALLY so until THIS moment, where now everyone is trying to wiggle out.

"We just didn't KNOW! UwU"

FUCK THIS ENTIRE FUCKING NAZI COUNTRY

[aflyingcontradiction]

Outing myself as an adult who habitually watches children's shows here, but I really, really appreciate this year's "Die Sendung mit der Maus" summer journey! (For the non-Germans: Die Sendung mit der Maus is a publicly funded educational / entertainment program for kids that has existed since the 70s). Like, I've watched some of the past years' summer journeys in their archives and travelling through Germany or certain German regions for 6 weeks is still pretty interesting (some of their most interesting segments, tbh). But having a host with a migration background travel to Morocco, where her family came from, and talk about both their immigrant experiences and interesting things you can find in Morocco is just ... chef's kiss!

This show has gotten so GOOD!

[queerism1969]

[mapsontheweb]

Most common refugee nationalities per district in Germany

by u/Aggressive-Row-403

[africanrefugeeswelcome]

German woman in love with her African man