The storied city of Weimar, Germany population 65, , absorbed refugees in a year. Our journalists spent months on the ground examining integration from all sides. The German woman , herself an immigrant from Ghana, jerked forward with such force her hoop earrings swung like pendulums.
The Syrian man, one of asylum-seekers welcomed in Weimar, Germany, was no less upset. This is a misconception. There is a separate section in the back for them. So it went in a four-month cultural crash course pairing Weimar residents with refugees, and in informal interactions around the city and the rest of Germany, as roughly one million people arrived in galvanic waves from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The rapid influx shook European social structures, accelerated a rise in right-wing nationalism and saddled social welfare systems with the complex challenge of absorbing so many desperate wanderers at once. Germany led the way in numbers of refugees and in programs to support them, as Chancellor Angela Merkel called for constituents to open their communities and, not incidentally, provide work in a nation where , jobs went unfilled last year.
The German government spent Nearly , newcomers to Germany were charged last year, according to the data, accounting for 8. The city settled the migrants with classic German efficiency and astonishing speed by all measurable criteria: They were housed, clothed and fed, the children enrolled in local schools and the adults in government-paid classes to learn the basics of the language, laws and customs.
They had health care, first through a new refugee department in the city government and then, once they were granted official refugee status, through the social service channels used by all Germans. But on the person-to-person level where integration really happens, there are staggering cultural headwinds. On issues like gender, sexuality, religion in the public sphere and even the seemingly mundane matter of punctuality, the differences may take generations to overcome.
