European refugee crisis thread

[LaCroix]

I think they also trust Germany not to round them up and put them into concentration camps... which is quite a turn-around from 70 yeas ago and shows just how much the world has changed in some respects. The refugees clearly do NOT trust the Hungarian government. Honestly, stuffing people onto trains and taking them into camps? Yeah, that would give me the willies, too.

This is bullshit - every nation has refugee camps where people go at first, to be processed and then sent to more adequate places. Talking about "concentrattion camps" in this context is well below you. I feel deeply insulted.

Well, not a particularly kind, option, but not the worst of all worlds, either. If they won't help them then at least they will not hinder their passage.
I do fear there will still be fatalities along the way – on a march like that not everyone will make it.
*snip*
The news also showed some Hungarians giving food and water to the walkers and the walkers accepting their help – again, I think the trust issue is with the government of Hungary, not so much with individual Hungarians. The Syrians are afraid of being imprisoned and left to rot, or possibly worse, and I don't think it's entirely unfounded.

Again - imprisoned and left to rot, or worse... That's disgusting...
You should also know better than to trust "the news" about things going on.
http://video-fra3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hvideo ... e=55EACDA3
The fact is that the refugees refuse any aid given to them by the government. 'The news' just don't want people to know, because it's much more convenient to have people outraged at the "vile hungarians who try to imprison refugees for unknown profit".

And just in case you ask - the masks are a precaution to not infect the weakened refugees. The problem is that the refugees decline any interaction on principle. They didn't even accept food or water.

At least they make exceptions for the kids.

[Metahive]

So Teema Kurdi who is interviewed in the video is not the boys aunt because of the name of the youtube uploader? Hello Mr Wishful Thinking

I mock your usual bad choice of sources, yes. If there's any legitimity to it, you might as well take it from a source that isn't already screaming "XENOPHOBIC ASSHOLE!".

Read more about Teema here:
Father of dead boys: 'All I want is to be with my children'
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/0005706c ... ned-turkey

Dude, that link is not supporting your original verbal diarrhea which was this:

That boy is hot stuff on social media right now. Someone claimed that they had lived 3 years in Turkey but wanted to move to Greece to get dental care for the father. Were they forced onto that boat at gunpoint?

First, "social media" you think this is some sort of facebook farce? Fuck you. Second, "someone claimed"? Someone claimed Cosmical Ali eats shit and drinks manure, someone knows his stuff. Third "Were they forced onto that boat at gunpoint"? So...never heard about desperation? Ah, I get it, you try to portray the boy as some sort of "welfare refugee" while engaging in victim blaming.

You're one shitty human being, do you know that?

[Thanas]

German police are expecting 5000 arrivals today, 1000 more than Cameron wants to take in.

Meanwhile, the prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia rejected any quota system for accepting migrants, aka "Let the Germans and Austrians worry". Well don't count on me being in favour of you getting EU money then.

[Thanas]

A few facts by the Guardian on the problems:

#1. Syria’s conflict increasingly looks like war-without-end. The millions waiting it out in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon are coming to the view that they’ll never go back and need permanent solutions.

#2. The UN is running out of cash to help people. Here’s a chart that shows UNHCR’s funding shortfall for Syrians.
Link

#3. The crisis is only a crisis because of the European response to it. EU countries have spent all year debating and procrastinating about an appropriate solution to Europe’s biggest refugee movement since the second world war.

The chart shows the problem: a few countries are bearing the brunt, while at least a dozen others take in virtually no one. Any attempt to parcel out refugees to all 28 EU countries in proportion to the size of their populations is being resisted by those where there is a deep-seated apprehension about becoming “overrun” by refugees.
Link

[The Romulan Republic]

German police are expecting 5000 arrivals today, 1000 more than Cameron wants to take in.

Meanwhile, the prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia rejected any quota system for accepting migrants, aka "Let the Germans and Austrians worry". Well don't count on me being in favour of you getting EU money then.

On the other hand, I find it hard to imagine many refugees wanting to settle in those countries. If that's their attitude towards immigrants, they'd have to be nuts to actually want to live their. At least in Germany they might be treated decently.

Still, its absolutely shameful that certain EU members aren't willing to do their part to help.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Not literal collapse, but a sudden influx of several million people in just one year into Europe will inevitably be disruptive even without a “fear of dark people”.

Of course it will be difficult to deal with the influx, but it is not an EXISTENTIAL threat (as cosmicalstorm is implying) unless you simply fear dark people.

I mean, fuck, go back and look at the post of his I was responding to. He wasn't make a reasoned argument about the economic burden of dealing with refugees. He posted a projection of the population growth of Africa and basically said, "WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO WITH SO MANY BLACK PEOPLE?!?!?!" It's blindingly obvious that he doesn't have an argument other than not wanting there to be more dark people in his backyard. So far, none of the arguments he have made have even addressed any of the practical issues with dealing with the refugee crisis, as you, Thanas, and others have in this thread.

[Thanas]

German police are expecting 5000 arrivals today, 1000 more than Cameron wants to take in.

Meanwhile, the prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia rejected any quota system for accepting migrants, aka "Let the Germans and Austrians worry". Well don't count on me being in favour of you getting EU money then.

On the other hand, I find it hard to imagine many refugees wanting to settle in those countries. If that's their attitude towards immigrants, they'd have to be nuts to actually want to live their. At least in Germany they might be treated decently.

Still, its absolutely shameful that certain EU members aren't willing to do their part to help.

It would do those nations a lot of good IMO to have some dark and brown people living among them, would certainly help to alleviate racism in one or two generations time.

[Broomstick]

I think they also trust Germany not to round them up and put them into concentration camps... which is quite a turn-around from 70 yeas ago and shows just how much the world has changed in some respects. The refugees clearly do NOT trust the Hungarian government. Honestly, stuffing people onto trains and taking them into camps? Yeah, that would give me the willies, too.

This is bullshit - every nation has refugee camps where people go at first, to be processed and then sent to more adequate places. Talking about "concentrattion camps" in this context is well below you. I feel deeply insulted.

Step back and take a deep breath.

I did not say that "concentration camps" was what was happening, I said that is the FEAR.

Yes, I am well aware that camps for refugees are everywhere and they're not "concentration camps". I'm also aware they are far from ideal and there are serious problems associated with attempting to house hundreds of thousands on short notice, and I do not make an exception for my own nation. We've had concentration camps in the US as far back as the civil war era, and our housing for people post-Katrina also had some serious issues, some of them arising because we were trying to avoid massive camps for the displaced.

With the best will in the world, the Hungarians could have set up state-of-the-art holding centers for the incoming refugees but quickly found the holding capacity of the camps greatly exceeded leading to terrible conditions. Then the Syrians in those places could have interpreted unanticipated crowding and deteriorating conditions as malice rather than a misjudgment of numbers. Personally, I think that is what happened - I don't think the Hungarians were intending outright harm with their attempted camp solution but that's not how it came across.

Nonetheless, the end result is that the Syrians became afraid of being locked into appalling conditions for years on end. It's not an entirely baseless fear, that has happened to some people. And we all see the result.

I also am guessing that the Hungarians see hundreds of thousands of desperate people crossing their border and they had a WTF? moment - between just the sheer numbers and some past history between Muslims and Hungarians I can also understand the Hungarian authorities scrambling to try to get a handle on the situation. While the refugees have, apparently, been largely peaceful and harmless you can't look at a mob that large and not worry about it turning ugly.

It was stupid situation - the Hungarians didn't want them to stay, and the Syrians did not want to stay either. Really, what everyone wanted was passage through Hungary for the Syrians. As I said, while the solution to let them walk wasn't the best it was far from the worst outcome.

It did not help that at one point you had thousands of people boarding trains without knowing their destination but assuming it was another country, but then getting stop and told to unload into camp type situations. Rightly or wrongly the refugees felt tricked. Of course, if the Hungarians had been explicit about the destination they may not have had many people get onto those trains and the trains station still would have been packed. Again, I can understand why the authorities might have looked to the solution they attempted with some sympathy, but still think it's a mistake.

Reports are that the Hungarians are now providing busses for the walkers and at least some of the refugees are taking them up on it. Which is good.

Again - imprisoned and left to rot, or worse... That's disgusting...

Yes, it's a disgusting notion but it's one that some Syrians really do have. What, you think there isn't bigotry on both sides of this scenario?

Of course, sometimes you get a better result trying to understand why someone is afraid rather than simply calling them "disgusting".

No, I don't think the Hungarian government had malice here - if they really intended harm to the refugees I would have expected them to go about it much more efficiently and effectively. I do think some of their actions were ham-handed and a bit thoughtless as to how it looked from the receiving end, but that hardly makes them exceptional.

The fact is that the refugees refuse any aid given to them by the government. 'The news' just don't want people to know, because it's much more convenient to have people outraged at the "vile hungarians who try to imprison refugees for unknown profit".

Incorrect - not all have refused aid. In fact, as I pointed out, many of the refugees have acted food and water from Hungarian individuals, and many are taking up the offer of a bus ride over a long walk. So no, "the refugees" do not refuse all aid, as you imply.

And just in case you ask - the masks are a precaution to not infect the weakened refugees. The problem is that the refugees decline any interaction on principle. They didn't even accept food or water.

Oh, I get the idea with the masks, our rescue people use them here when there are large crowds.

I wonder if part of the food refusal has to do with religious dietary restrictions? I don't know - would having an imam along with the authorities help at all to reassure these people that their customs are, to the extent possible, being respected? That sort of good-will gesture goes a long way to reassuring people. Just a thought, off the top of my head.

At least they make exceptions for the kids.

Well, then, maybe there's a notion that the aid is limited so parents take care of their kids first? That's not an uncommon reaction. I'm just saying, it's easy to assume malice towards the other side, maybe some of this is more misunderstanding than anything else.

[cmdrjones]

German police are expecting 5000 arrivals today, 1000 more than Cameron wants to take in.

Meanwhile, the prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia rejected any quota system for accepting migrants, aka "Let the Germans and Austrians worry". Well don't count on me being in favour of you getting EU money then.

On the other hand, I find it hard to imagine many refugees wanting to settle in those countries. If that's their attitude towards immigrants, they'd have to be nuts to actually want to live their. At least in Germany they might be treated decently.

Still, its absolutely shameful that certain EU members aren't willing to do their part to help.

It would do those nations a lot of good IMO to have some dark and brown people living among them, would certainly help to alleviate racism in one or two generations time.

hello, I'd like to introduce myself.... I am apparently the boards resident expert on racism. Unless Europeans have a history of being significantly less racist than white, southern, confederate type americans... I am not sure physical proximity and one or two generations is going to cut it.

[ray245]

I wonder if Germany has made any long term plans to resettle the refugees and help them integrate in the German society? A large number of refugees would most likely end up staying in Germany in the long run, as long as Syria is still in a civil war and the country is unable to be rebuilt.

[Broomstick]

Especially if other countries don't want to take any of these people.

[cmdrjones]

I wonder if Germany has made any long term plans to resettle the refugees and help them integrate in the German society? A large number of refugees would most likely end up staying in Germany in the long run, as long as Syria is still in a civil war and the country is unable to be rebuilt.

Its ironic that Germany is now the destination for refugees fleeing from an invasion rather than the source. The last time something on this scale occurred there were legionaries along the Rhine.

[Metahive]

I wonder if Germany has made any long term plans to resettle the refugees and help them integrate in the German society? A large number of refugees would most likely end up staying in Germany in the long run, as long as Syria is still in a civil war and the country is unable to be rebuilt.

Its ironic that Germany is now the destination for refugees fleeing from an invasion rather than the source. The last time something on this scale occurred there were legionaries along the Rhine.

Nope, because there were no legionaries during the Migration Period, the Roman military had been reformed by then and consistet of borderguards called Limitanei and mobile troops called Comtitanses. Also, the migration happened from Germany towards the Roman Empire and it's actually called into question by historians nowadays if those actually were whole nations migrating and not just roving warbands.

/PSA

[ray245]

Especially if other countries don't want to take any of these people.

I don't think there are too many countries that will do so, especially when so many developed countries are still having problems with recession and high unemployment. That has often become an easy excuse, together with being xenophobic of Muslims.

Diaspora communities can be difficult to handle, especially during their early years in a host countries.

[salm]

I wonder if Germany has made any long term plans to resettle the refugees and help them integrate in the German society? A large number of refugees would most likely end up staying in Germany in the long run, as long as Syria is still in a civil war and the country is unable to be rebuilt.

A plan? Lol. Two months ago they were still talking about making camps as unpleasent as possible in order to discourage refugees ro come. Esspecially Bavaria. People have been coming to Germany for quite a while now and for some reason the ones comming now are "a surprise". Fuck no, there is no plan. The government ignored this situation which plenty of people have been warning of for years. There was plenty of time to prepare and plenty of voices calling for action but the Merkel/Gabriel governmen decided to stay inactive.

[ray245]

I wonder if Germany has made any long term plans to resettle the refugees and help them integrate in the German society? A large number of refugees would most likely end up staying in Germany in the long run, as long as Syria is still in a civil war and the country is unable to be rebuilt.

A plan? Lol. Two months ago they were still talking about making camps as unpleasent as possible in order to discourage refugees ro come. Esspecially Bavaria. People have been coming to Germany for quite a while now and for some reason the ones comming now are "a surprise". Fuck no, there is no plan. The government ignored this situation which plenty of people have been warning of for years. There was plenty of time to prepare and plenty of voices calling for action but the Merkel/Gabriel governmen decided to stay inactive.

With the sudden shift in attitude, there needs to be a really decent long term plan, in order to avoid any future issues in the future. There's still a need to acknowledge the fact that a large number of these refugees are coming from a culture that's far more socially conservative than Western Europe. Helping these refugees that want to settle in Germany in the long run that people will shun them because of their perceived socially conservative values, is perhaps one of the most important and difficult hurdle to overcome.

It's one thing to teach their children about cultural values of Germany and let them be exposed in an environment which they could adopt such values as a part of their national and ethnic identity. It's a much harder thing to teach people who are already of age, and people much older to reject some of the ideas they once held dear to.



Thought I should post this.


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/world ... ugees.html

As Germany Welcomes Migrants, Some Wonder How to Make Acceptance Last

BERLIN — As tens of thousands of asylum seekers now pour into Germany, their desired destination, they will be met here by bowls of steaming soup and bread rolls, working bathrooms and an efficient bureaucracy to move them to temporary housing and, possibly, legal immigration status.

The arrival in August of more than 104,400 people seeking asylum has strained resources and challenged authorities from Bavaria to Berlin. Yet such logistical problems are manageable for the Germans, who pride themselves on the country’s order and adherence to established rules.

But the long-term integration of a group of people expected to reach 1 percent of the overall population, most of whom practice a different religion and often hold profoundly different world views, is another question altogether.

While the prospect of accepting an expected 800,000 new residents this year offers Germany an opportunity to rejuvenate its aging demographics and ensure its economic prosperity, it also challenges a prevailing cultural consensus of what it means to be German.

“The refugees are synonymous with formidable change,” Thomas de Maizière, Germany’s interior minister, said recently in an interview with the German weekly Die Zeit. “We must get used to the thought that our country is changing.”

That change is at the doorstep. When thousands of migrants were allowed to leave Hungary late Friday and were put on buses to the Austrian border, many were brandishing posters of Chancellor Angela Merkel. In their days of near internment in the inhospitable Hungarian capital, some of the exhausted and desperate travelers broke into chants of “Germany, Germany” and “Merkel, Merkel,” demanding to be allowed to continue their journey west.

Germans have met previous waves — and a steady tide — of these newcomers with an outpouring of generosity and support. Thousands of volunteers have shown up in camps to feed the migrants. Others have delivered water and fruit to refugees to ease their long, hot waits as they register their arrival. And some Germans have even risked arrest to circumvent the immigration bureaucracy and shelter some of the most vulnerable in their churches.

Munich police overseeing the arrival on Monday of trains from Budapest, packed with some 1,300 migrants, were so overwhelmed with public donations that they had to cut off the flow by the next afternoon. As the city prepared for the latest wave on Saturday, those volunteers were incorporated into the authorities’ official response plans.

But some fear the outpouring of generosity will not last. The Social Ministry expects the German government to spend 1.8 billion to 3.3 billion euros, about $2 billion to $3.7 billion, in 2016 to cover the refugees’ basic needs, language lessons and job training. As those costs mount, so might resentment.

Already Germany has experienced a formidable backlash against the migrants — the worst in Europe. Although the country does not have an influential far-right political party, such as France’s National Front or the Freedom Party of Austria, smaller neo-Nazi and right-wing groups have seized on the issue, organizing demonstrations outside homes for asylum seekers. In the first six months of this year, there were more than 200 arson and other attacks on facilities for migrants, and on migrants themselves.

“This massive immigration is increasingly seen in the growing worries of Germans,” said Ronny Zasowk of the far-right National Democratic Party, known by its German initials N.P.D. He warned that social structures would be overwhelmed and said that many of the party’s followers feared that an open-door policy could make Germany more vulnerable to Islamic extremism and terrorism.

Mr. de Maizière, whose office is responsible for coordinating the response to the newcomers, has called for more police, but also for more teachers and social workers to help with, for example, the mounds of paperwork necessary to enter into the bureaucratic system. But in the long-term, he warned, more resources will be needed to help the asylum seekers, many of whom fled chaotic and largely dysfunctional states, to adapt to a new way of life.

Among the strongest voices urging tolerance toward immigrants have been the German news media, from the mass-circulation Bild to the public television stations. Experts point to the news media’s positive stance as crucial in helping the public shift its perception of more foreigners coming to the country.

Recalling Nazi racial laws that singled out the Germanic, or Aryan, people as superior to other ethnicities, leading to the Holocaust and the atrocities of World War II, President Joachim Gauck recently urged Germans to embrace the diversity that has since grown up around them.

Until “even more people can part with the image of a nation that is very homogeneous and in which nearly all people speak German as their mother tongue, are fair-skinned and largely Christian,” he said, their perception of German society will not reflect the reality of who lives here.

“In reality, life as we live it here is already far more diverse,” Mr. Gauck said. “In our heads we know this, but the spirit sometimes lags behind. We as a nation must redefine ourselves, as a collective of different people, but who all accept common values.”

Many, including Ms. Merkel, have compared the challenge facing Germany to the historic decisions after the breach of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, when the leaders of West Germany swiftly enacted measures aimed at ensuring the peaceful merger of what for decades had been two separate states.

Even as the country prepares to mark a quarter-century of German reunification this fall, a spate of violent anti-immigrant protests in the eastern state of Saxony has led to accusations that differences between the two regions still exist, revealing just how difficult it can be even for two peoples who share a language and heritage to feel as one.

Experts also point to the former West Germany’s far less successful experiment of integration in the 1960s, when that country invited men, most of them from Turkey, to fill the industrial jobs in its post-World War II factories. But they were viewed as “guests,” who would eventually return home, not as future citizens.

“For a long time, we made the mistake of considering migrant workers ‘guest workers,’ ” Ms. Merkel recently told reporters, “an idea that we have recently come to abandon, faced with the reality they are our fellow citizens, no matter what their ancestry.”

The descendants of those “guest workers” who remained in the country now make up the nearly four million Muslims in Germany’s population of almost 82 million. But failure to address the workers’ initial needs, and later those of their families, still reverberate. Only this year did the German Parliament pass legislation that would allow children of migrants who were raised or educated in the country to adopt German citizenship, while keeping their own.

“Had we worked to integrate them from the beginning, there would be a lot fewer problems today,” said Claudia Walther, a senior project manager with the Bertelsmann Foundation in Germany who has worked on integration.

German leaders see that experience as a moment from which lawmakers can draw valuable lessons as they look ahead to a political summit meeting on Sept. 24 aimed at adopting legal and, possibly, constitutional changes to help the country adapt to the latest influx.

But the Turkish experience is apparently very much on the mind of Mr. de Maizière, who brought it up during the interview with Die Zeit and perhaps provided the starkest insight into the concerns of German leaders as they prepare to accept the thousands heading their way.

“Now we will get hundreds of thousands of Muslims more formed by Arabic background,” he told the weekly. “According to all that I am told by my French colleague, that is a big difference, as far as integration is concerned.”

[cmdrjones]

I wonder if Germany has made any long term plans to resettle the refugees and help them integrate in the German society? A large number of refugees would most likely end up staying in Germany in the long run, as long as Syria is still in a civil war and the country is unable to be rebuilt.

A plan? Lol. Two months ago they were still talking about making camps as unpleasent as possible in order to discourage refugees ro come. Esspecially Bavaria. People have been coming to Germany for quite a while now and for some reason the ones comming now are "a surprise". Fuck no, there is no plan. The government ignored this situation which plenty of people have been warning of for years. There was plenty of time to prepare and plenty of voices calling for action but the Merkel/Gabriel governmen decided to stay inactive.

With the sudden shift in attitude, there needs to be a really decent long term plan, in order to avoid any future issues in the future. There's still a need to acknowledge the fact that a large number of these refugees are coming from a culture that's far more socially conservative than Western Europe. Helping these refugees that want to settle in Germany in the long run that people will shun them because of their perceived socially conservative values, is perhaps one of the most important and difficult hurdle to overcome.

It's one thing to teach their children about cultural values of Germany and let them be exposed in an environment which they could adopt such values as a part of their national and ethnic identity. It's a much harder thing to teach people who are already of age, and people much older to reject some of the ideas they once held dear to.



Thought I should post this.


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/world ... ugees.html

As Germany Welcomes Migrants, Some Wonder How to Make Acceptance Last

BERLIN — As tens of thousands of asylum seekers now pour into Germany, their desired destination, they will be met here by bowls of steaming soup and bread rolls, working bathrooms and an efficient bureaucracy to move them to temporary housing and, possibly, legal immigration status.

The arrival in August of more than 104,400 people seeking asylum has strained resources and challenged authorities from Bavaria to Berlin. Yet such logistical problems are manageable for the Germans, who pride themselves on the country’s order and adherence to established rules.

But the long-term integration of a group of people expected to reach 1 percent of the overall population, most of whom practice a different religion and often hold profoundly different world views, is another question altogether.

While the prospect of accepting an expected 800,000 new residents this year offers Germany an opportunity to rejuvenate its aging demographics and ensure its economic prosperity, it also challenges a prevailing cultural consensus of what it means to be German.

“The refugees are synonymous with formidable change,” Thomas de Maizière, Germany’s interior minister, said recently in an interview with the German weekly Die Zeit. “We must get used to the thought that our country is changing.”

That change is at the doorstep. When thousands of migrants were allowed to leave Hungary late Friday and were put on buses to the Austrian border, many were brandishing posters of Chancellor Angela Merkel. In their days of near internment in the inhospitable Hungarian capital, some of the exhausted and desperate travelers broke into chants of “Germany, Germany” and “Merkel, Merkel,” demanding to be allowed to continue their journey west.

Germans have met previous waves — and a steady tide — of these newcomers with an outpouring of generosity and support. Thousands of volunteers have shown up in camps to feed the migrants. Others have delivered water and fruit to refugees to ease their long, hot waits as they register their arrival. And some Germans have even risked arrest to circumvent the immigration bureaucracy and shelter some of the most vulnerable in their churches.

Munich police overseeing the arrival on Monday of trains from Budapest, packed with some 1,300 migrants, were so overwhelmed with public donations that they had to cut off the flow by the next afternoon. As the city prepared for the latest wave on Saturday, those volunteers were incorporated into the authorities’ official response plans.

But some fear the outpouring of generosity will not last. The Social Ministry expects the German government to spend 1.8 billion to 3.3 billion euros, about $2 billion to $3.7 billion, in 2016 to cover the refugees’ basic needs, language lessons and job training. As those costs mount, so might resentment.

Already Germany has experienced a formidable backlash against the migrants — the worst in Europe. Although the country does not have an influential far-right political party, such as France’s National Front or the Freedom Party of Austria, smaller neo-Nazi and right-wing groups have seized on the issue, organizing demonstrations outside homes for asylum seekers. In the first six months of this year, there were more than 200 arson and other attacks on facilities for migrants, and on migrants themselves.

“This massive immigration is increasingly seen in the growing worries of Germans,” said Ronny Zasowk of the far-right National Democratic Party, known by its German initials N.P.D. He warned that social structures would be overwhelmed and said that many of the party’s followers feared that an open-door policy could make Germany more vulnerable to Islamic extremism and terrorism.

Mr. de Maizière, whose office is responsible for coordinating the response to the newcomers, has called for more police, but also for more teachers and social workers to help with, for example, the mounds of paperwork necessary to enter into the bureaucratic system. But in the long-term, he warned, more resources will be needed to help the asylum seekers, many of whom fled chaotic and largely dysfunctional states, to adapt to a new way of life.

Among the strongest voices urging tolerance toward immigrants have been the German news media, from the mass-circulation Bild to the public television stations. Experts point to the news media’s positive stance as crucial in helping the public shift its perception of more foreigners coming to the country.

Recalling Nazi racial laws that singled out the Germanic, or Aryan, people as superior to other ethnicities, leading to the Holocaust and the atrocities of World War II, President Joachim Gauck recently urged Germans to embrace the diversity that has since grown up around them.

Until “even more people can part with the image of a nation that is very homogeneous and in which nearly all people speak German as their mother tongue, are fair-skinned and largely Christian,” he said, their perception of German society will not reflect the reality of who lives here.

“In reality, life as we live it here is already far more diverse,” Mr. Gauck said. “In our heads we know this, but the spirit sometimes lags behind. We as a nation must redefine ourselves, as a collective of different people, but who all accept common values.”

Many, including Ms. Merkel, have compared the challenge facing Germany to the historic decisions after the breach of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, when the leaders of West Germany swiftly enacted measures aimed at ensuring the peaceful merger of what for decades had been two separate states.

Even as the country prepares to mark a quarter-century of German reunification this fall, a spate of violent anti-immigrant protests in the eastern state of Saxony has led to accusations that differences between the two regions still exist, revealing just how difficult it can be even for two peoples who share a language and heritage to feel as one.

Experts also point to the former West Germany’s far less successful experiment of integration in the 1960s, when that country invited men, most of them from Turkey, to fill the industrial jobs in its post-World War II factories. But they were viewed as “guests,” who would eventually return home, not as future citizens.

“For a long time, we made the mistake of considering migrant workers ‘guest workers,’ ” Ms. Merkel recently told reporters, “an idea that we have recently come to abandon, faced with the reality they are our fellow citizens, no matter what their ancestry.”

The descendants of those “guest workers” who remained in the country now make up the nearly four million Muslims in Germany’s population of almost 82 million. But failure to address the workers’ initial needs, and later those of their families, still reverberate. Only this year did the German Parliament pass legislation that would allow children of migrants who were raised or educated in the country to adopt German citizenship, while keeping their own.

“Had we worked to integrate them from the beginning, there would be a lot fewer problems today,” said Claudia Walther, a senior project manager with the Bertelsmann Foundation in Germany who has worked on integration.

German leaders see that experience as a moment from which lawmakers can draw valuable lessons as they look ahead to a political summit meeting on Sept. 24 aimed at adopting legal and, possibly, constitutional changes to help the country adapt to the latest influx.

But the Turkish experience is apparently very much on the mind of Mr. de Maizière, who brought it up during the interview with Die Zeit and perhaps provided the starkest insight into the concerns of German leaders as they prepare to accept the thousands heading their way.

“Now we will get hundreds of thousands of Muslims more formed by Arabic background,” he told the weekly. “According to all that I am told by my French colleague, that is a big difference, as far as integration is concerned.”

OR this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/artic ... untry.html

Oh and metahive thank you for picking that nit!

[Thanas]

I wonder if Germany has made any long term plans to resettle the refugees and help them integrate in the German society? A large number of refugees would most likely end up staying in Germany in the long run, as long as Syria is still in a civil war and the country is unable to be rebuilt.

Its ironic that Germany is now the destination for refugees fleeing from an invasion rather than the source. The last time something on this scale occurred there were legionaries along the Rhine.

Actually it happened plenty of times before that.

Look up Hugenots, Jews, Protestants from Austria etc....

Nope, because there were no legionaries during the Migration Period, the Roman military had been reformed by then and consistet of borderguards called Limitanei and mobile troops called Comtitanses.

Are you being stupid? Limitanei and Comitatenses are extra designations, like "currently detached to the border" or "to the field army". Guess what they were still called first and foremost?

[cmdrjones]

I wonder if Germany has made any long term plans to resettle the refugees and help them integrate in the German society? A large number of refugees would most likely end up staying in Germany in the long run, as long as Syria is still in a civil war and the country is unable to be rebuilt.

Its ironic that Germany is now the destination for refugees fleeing from an invasion rather than the source. The last time something on this scale occurred there were legionaries along the Rhine.

Actually it happened plenty of times before that.

Look up Hugenots, Jews, Protestants from Austria etc....

Nope, because there were no legionaries during the Migration Period, the Roman military had been reformed by then and consistet of borderguards called Limitanei and mobile troops called Comtitanses.

Are you being stupid? Limitanei and Comitatenses are extra designations, like "currently detached to the border" or "to the field army". Guess what they were still called first and foremost?

I was going for the most obvious one and the event with the greatest long term consequences.... the last time Germany received a population movement like this was after WWII, but those were volksdeutch expelled from eastern and central europe.
Yeah the allies could be assholes too!

[Metahive]

Are you being stupid? Limitanei and Comitatenses are extra designations, like "currently detached to the border" or "to the field army". Guess what they were still called first and foremost?

Uhhhhh...milites? Hey, a guy's gonna' try.

[Broomstick]

Diaspora communities can be difficult to handle, especially during their early years in a host countries.

Yes, but it can be done.

While there are certainly xenophobic elements in any nation so far Germany seems to be coping, and modern Germans are certainly more open to immigrants and change than their predecessors.

[ray245]

Diaspora communities can be difficult to handle, especially during their early years in a host countries.

Yes, but it can be done.

While there are certainly xenophobic elements in any nation so far Germany seems to be coping, and modern Germans are certainly more open to immigrants and change than their predecessors.

I think so too, especially if refugees are actually housed with the local population. It would provide some avenues of much closer cross-cultural exchange, and that process is perhaps key to letting more people from a vastly different culture understand each other. This would avoid a repeat of the problems with assimilating Turkish population in Germany.

[Simon_Jester]

I think they also trust Germany not to round them up and put them into concentration camps... which is quite a turn-around from 70 yeas ago and shows just how much the world has changed in some respects. The refugees clearly do NOT trust the Hungarian government. Honestly, stuffing people onto trains and taking them into camps? Yeah, that would give me the willies, too.

This is bullshit - every nation has refugee camps where people go at first, to be processed and then sent to more adequate places. Talking about "concentrattion camps" in this context is well below you. I feel deeply insulted.

I think Broomstick may have pointed to a valid issue here. Refugees may not actually be worried about extermination, but that doesn't mean they're willing to comply with just any directions the government gives them. Hungary has recent history of strongly nationalist, xenophobic politics, and it is not a very wealthy or prosperous country by European standards.

The refugees might (probably irrationally) fear that the Hungarian government is planning to ship them into a camp in the hills and then more or less forget about them. Or that the poverty will result in them getting inadequate facilities indefinitely. At least now, camped out in the middle of a major city, they know the news media will be watching and they have realistic access to transportation out of the country.

The fact is that the refugees refuse any aid given to them by the government. 'The news' just don't want people to know, because it's much more convenient to have people outraged at the "vile hungarians who try to imprison refugees for unknown profit".

And just in case you ask - the masks are a precaution to not infect the weakened refugees. The problem is that the refugees decline any interaction on principle. They didn't even accept food or water.

Thing is, the refugees have to have some kind of motive for this. Hungry men do not refuse food without cause.

So what, in their minds, is going on?

[Thanas]

Are you being stupid? Limitanei and Comitatenses are extra designations, like "currently detached to the border" or "to the field army". Guess what they were still called first and foremost?

Uhhhhh...milites? Hey, a guy's gonna' try.

No they were still legions. The distinction between Limitanei and Comitatenses was for the most part an administrative one, only later on does it actually mean a decrease in quality (if it even did that).

[salm]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/artic ... untry.html

Why would anything written by a moron in a tabloid rag be of importance?