A fairy tale usually begins with once upon a time…
He gets a small stipend from the government, plenty of food, a clean bed and access to classes where he is working hard to learn German.
While Ali, a 30-year-old Syrian refugee, misses his family and worries a lot about the horror of war back home, he knows he is one of the lucky ones.
“If things work out,” he said, “I can stay here forever.”
But it’s not entirely clear if things will work out. In fact, Ali is in limbo. Despite having arrived in Germany almost two years ago, he is still living in what was supposed to be a temporary government-sponsored refugee camp — a sprawling complex of cubiclelike rooms inside the huge, Nazi-era military airport terminal known as Tempelhof.
Ali’s case may be as a good a measure as any of Germany’s ongoing struggle to integrate an unprecedented influx of asylum seekers since 2015, when Chancellor Angela Merkel won praise from human rights groups by announcing that the nation would allow in more than 1 million refugees from Syria and other mainly Middle Eastern war zones.
Ms. Merkel’s move was a stark contrast to the approach by the United States, where President Obama struggled for approval to allow in just 10,000 Syrians before leaving office early this year, and President Trump has moved to block all refugees temporarily, cut back sharply on the number to be let in and ban visas for people from several corners of the Muslim world.
But the politics around Ms. Merkel’s “open door” policy to allow in more refugees than any other nation in the European Union have been no less intense. The chancellor’s approval ratings plunged last year as critics seized on a series of terrorist attacks by asylum seekers as evidence of the policy’s disastrous ramifications.
“If I was able to, I would turn back time by many, many years so that I could have prepared the whole government and the authorities for the situation, which hit us out of the blue in the late summer of 2015,” she said after a series of electoral setbacks for her ruling Christian Democratic Party late last year.[…]
German public opinion toward refugees has fluctuated while political divisions have hardened.
One man of German descent in his 40s, who spoke on the condition of not being named, said there was initially a huge welcome for refugees by a society with lingering guilt over the Nazi treatment of the Jews and other minorities during the Holocaust.