The two contrasting sides of German refugee policy

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to welcome around one million refugees and asylum seekers has led to mixed fortunes four years on.

Mohammad Zarzorie, from Latakia in Syria, arrived in Germany in 2015 and now works as an engineer in a chromium plating factory on the outskirts of Munich. (Ruairi Casey/TNH)

By Ruairi Casey

MUNICH, Germany

Four years after Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the doors to around one million refugees and asylum seekers, Germany continues to mull over the long-term consequences of its great welcome. It still grapples with fundamental questions about how refugees should integrate and, for the tens of thousands of asylum seekers whose futures remain in limbo, who should be allowed to stay and who will be returned home?

Mohammad Zarzorie, a Syrian engineer, counts himself a success story. After fleeing to Germany via Greece and the Balkans in 2015, he received his refugee status within months, quickly learned to speak German, and through an employment fair soon found his job at a chromium plating manufacturer on the outskirts of Munich.

Two years later, his wife followed him, and although a housing crisis means they must live in an apartment attached to the factory, he has found peace and contentment here in the industrial heartland of Bavaria, in southern Germany.

“From a land that’s under war to (there) being nothing difficult for you to start your life in another safe country, it wasn’t difficult for me,” says Zarzorie, a university teaching assistant before conflict erupted in Syria.

“There was no challenge,” Zarzorie says. “Here in Germany they have this benefits system. They help you a lot to start integrating with society.”

Returning to the engineering work he was pursuing in Syria has been the foundation on which he has built a new life, and he eagerly wants more Syrians in Germany to enter employment. “I think they must (work) because you can’t start your life if you don’t work,” he says.

But not all new arrivals to Germany share his good fortune and have the opportunity to work.

Bavaria, Zarzorie’s new home, is consistently one of the most conservative and anti-migrant states in Germany. It has deported more than 1,700 people so far this year, and drawn…