Refugees queue outside the Ukrainian embassy in Berlin, Germany (Image: AP/Markus Schreiber)

In relative terms, it has been a low-key story. Relative, that is, to the furore that surrounded Germany’s decision to take more than a million refugees at the height of the EU refugee crisis in 2015-16.

It was then that former German chancellor Angela Merkel opened her arms to hundreds of thousands of the war-ravaged and destitute fleeing the Syrian tragedy, Iran and Iraq.

Germany again took more than a million refugees in 2022, most fleeing the high-intensity war in Ukraine — though with a far greater proportion of women and children. This time the locus of activity has been Berlin. In 2015 it was Munich, where 20,000 refugees arrived at Central Station on the first weekend of September alone.

I was living in Munich, and the reaction of both the people and the authorities was something to see. Temporary housing facilities were constructed in astonishingly quick time at the end of suburban streets and in the villages of Bavaria.

Well it may be that the mechanisms of Germany’s “Willkommenskultur” (welcoming culture) are working yet more effectively this time, against a backdrop of skilled labour shortages and a low birth rate.

“We’re much better trained than we were in 2015,” Elanur, who helps Ukrainian women, told French radio. “Back then, we were ill-prepared for the huge number of refugees, especially here in Berlin. But now Ukrainian refugees have the right to work immediately and receive language courses and residence permits straight away.” 

Not just in Germany. Ukrainians have been granted temporary protection status across the European Union. “Everything is going faster for them than with Syrians, Iraqis or Afghans in 2015,” Elanur said.

“To tell the truth, we have much less work with Ukrainian refugees than with others,” said Nora Bretzger, who has worked with migrants as a volunteer since 2011. “Because they have been given so many rights from the start. When someone arrives and has direct access to a residence permit, the housing market and labour markets, we, the associations, don’t have to fight as much.”

There is, however, a peripheral “bitterness” attached to this, according to Bretzger, also speaking to radio network France Info. “Because we see that the demands we made in 2015 were, in fact, possible. It’s just that there was less political will back then.”

If the “Willkommenskultur” is working better, a priori, than it was in 2015, things could still rapidly change. The German media is reporting that local authorities are increasingly worried about a lack of housing for new arrivals. As in 2016, sports halls are being turned into emergency shelters. Tegel, the former Berlin airport, is again being used to house refugees.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing, however, is just the extent of the German achievement in the face of the challenge of migration over the past seven or eight years. “Wir schaffen das,” (we’ll manage this), Merkel famously said in 2015 — and “manage it” Germans admirably have.

The dual emphasis on employment and language acquisition has meant jobs for hundreds of thousands of migrants, while benefiting from 700 hours of obligatory language tuition and cultural training through an elaborate network of Volkshochschule (adult education centres).

In the five years to 2021, according to Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany spent €719 million a year on integration courses, plus almost €360 million on vocational language courses.

The German experience surely carries lessons for other nations. The first is that the quicker migrants are in work, the more rapid their integration. “What voters don’t want to see is 20-year-olds idle in the streets when they’ve worked all their lives,” Belgian academic François Gemenne told Le 1. “From this, they conclude that migrants cost society a fortune, which is false.”

Another learning is that the more rigidly borders are closed, the more people smugglers become indispensable to those who want to cross them. (Surveillance firms and the arms industry are also major beneficiaries.) Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, senior researcher at the Institute for International Political Studies, said: “Displaced people have often travelled thousands of kilometres, taking multiple risks and they are not going to stop at the last obstacle.”

Europe is still struggling to agree on a common immigration and asylum policy for reasons of national sovereignty. The inclination is to let those countries most directly concerned manage as best they can something that should be a shared responsibility.

With the war ongoing, an inflationary European economy and winter far from over, one wonders at how the current chapter will play out. Alongside Ukrainians, Europe has recorded its highest annual influx of migrants from North Africa, the Middle East and Asia since the migration crisis. New arrivals tend to go where migrants already are, and troubles on New Year’s Eve in Berlin, redolent of Cologne in 2015, have reignited the argument about the link between “foreigners” and delinquency. 

As the EU’s Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson has pointed out, Russian President Vladimir Putin aims to create a wholesale refugee crisis in Europe. So nutting out EU-wide solutions has perhaps never been more important. But it’s not only that the crisis linked to Ukraine may actually worsen. The Mediterranean Sea is already one of the world’s largest cemeteries. The UN estimates that more than 23,000 lives have been lost to its depths since 2014.

The regional Thuringian Minister of Migration, Dirk Adams (Greens), wants to see more continuity in “refugee work”. “Taking in refugees is an ongoing task, not a project that will end at some point,” he says. This means, for example, making suitable refugee accommodation permanently available at the municipal level.

It also patently means that Europe is going to have find ways of more equally distributing, and settling, refugees.