So, as you may or may not have heard, Germany is currently in the process of failing spectacularly in dealing with the recent and continued influx of refugees. This is, of course, a crisis that came entirely out of the blue and totally hasn't been obviously coming (but ignored until recently) for years.
As it is, nobody actually knows how many refugees are in the country. Locals all over the place report that groups of refugees are setting up improvised camps for themselves. People who were never registered - and who now somehow have to feed themselves, let alone find medical assistance or actually keep themselves from freezing.
We also know that tens of thousands have been sent into official tent cities. Trouble is, winter's coming quickly and those tents aren't winter proof at all. So people are beginning to really feel the cold. According to experts, we can expect many of those tents to collapse as soon as there's any snow. Meanwhile, camp administrators admit that there's no way that all tents can be improved in time. Those who are better off have been sent into... shipping containers. Media currently isn't allowed to enter the largest refugee tent camp. From the air, they say, it resembles those African refugee camps we sometimes see in the news.
A few weeks ago, people were (rightfully) complaining about the disastrous conditions in those old, mouldy barracks they were sent to. Now you're considered lucky if your accommodation has actual walls and a roof.
As for the conditions in and around our refugee camps... well, here's what the chief of our police union has to say about them:
So now the government (CDU/CSU, Merkel's party) actively considers establishing "transit zones" - or, as their coalition partner SPD likes to call them: "Massive internment camps in no-man's-land".
What a great idea, right? Let's think about this for a second. We'll have massive camps full of people who will be waiting for the government to decide whether they do or they don't qualify for political asylum (because economic refugees who've lost any way to sustain themselves thanks to our economic policies obviously don't qualify at all!)
Well, for those transit zones to make any sense at all, people obviously can't leave them as long as asylum hasn't been granted. Judging by the conditions in our current camps, people will want to leave, though. So, I guess we'll need, at the very least, fences. Big fences. Wouldn't hurt to have a few guard towers, too, I suppose. And guards. Lots of them. Who had better be armed, you know.
Coming to think of it, I hear there are some historically relevant facilities left which should work pretty much perfectly. Barracks, fences, guard towers and everything! Brilliant! And no, those won't be concentration camps, because remember, we are calling them transit zones.
In case it isn't obvious, I personally don't consider "Let's create massive internment camps and treat those refugees like hardened criminals" a very humane solution. Besides, (and sincerely hoping we don't really collectively decide to re-activate Auschwitz and Buchenau) the whole idea isn't even practical. We can't provide weather-proof tents for everyone but now we're somehow going to set up huge camps for tens of thousands of people? Right.
So, what's the solution?
As far as I'm concerned, at this point everyone involved is pretty much fucked. Short term, we don't have anywhere near the infrastructure or organizational capabilities to deal with the amount of people who have already arrived, let alone the 1,3 million projected to reach the nation yearly from now on.
(Not the people actually responsible for the situation, of course. They have gated communities.)
Mid-term, there's no way this is going to end well. Germany pretty much had a failed immigration policy going on as it was. I personally don't know a single German city that doesn't have districts where pretty much only immigrants (plus a few natives who can't leave for various reasons) live. People don't go to these districts. I lived in one for about a year with my girlfriend and her kids (mostly, being from out of town, I didn't really know better and the rent was cheap.) That was great. I actually got attacked in the streets on my way to work. You couldn't even dream about letting the kids play outside. Speaking of kids, it was a very well known secret that there was child prostitution going on in the neighbourhood. You could buy illegal drugs over the counter if you knew where to knock in the streets where the police would either show up in force or (usually) not at all. Many of the residents didn't speak a word of German.
As I said, our immigration policy wasn't working very well before the refugees started showing up in numbers.
Mid-term, those who have been granted asylum are going to need a job.
As it is, there are currently about 3,8 million unemployed Germans looking for a job (official statistics, fine-print basically.) There are ~560.000 jobs available on average. Unless my basic maths skills are failing my quite impressively, this situation isn't going to improve by adding massive amounts of people desperately looking for a job. Well, actually, it is going to improve for our, er, job creators (and their political advocates) - who were quick to announce that in their opinion, refugees should totally be exempt from any minimum wage regulations.
Then there's the issue of housing. Currently, there's a shortage of between 400.000 and 700.000 (depending on the source) living quarters in Germany, homelessness definitely is not only a thing for a tiny fringe, any more. How exactly are we going to house hundreds of thousands of refugees again? Will those tents become a permanent thing? Are we going to dig caves? Seriously - where are people going to live?
Long term... Well, climate change related migration movements haven't even really begun, yet. But they will.
Good thing Germany recently buried any pretence of European solidarity with the ongoing sell-out of Greece, too, isn't it?
And yet, we HAVE TO find a way. Some way. Why? I couldn't say it any better than this:
As you may have noticed, I'm just not terribly optimistic about the whole thing. Those families who have somehow managed to make it here without drowning, asphyxiating in the back of some truck or getting murdered by random thugs at some border of "fortress Europe"? Men, women and children who come out of the home of a shark?
Won't be long now before properly scared Germans, helped along by the subtle manipulations of our main stream media and conservative politicians, demand we build higher fences. And guard towers. And even if that doesn't actually happen - as I mentioned above, I'm not sure we actually can help everyone.
If there is one promising solution I can think of, it'd be determining exactly what the causes of this mass migration are (which, honestly, isn't terribly hard to do) and throwing the whole political and economical weight of the nation into eliminating these causes. Which, I might add, aren't usually even mentioned in public discourse.
Is that going to happen? I'd certainly hope so - but at the same time, I strongly suspect that the whole situation is wildly profitable (as in $$$/€€€ but also as in geo-strategical interests) for important players.
Thoughts, anyone?