World Refugee Day

On occasion of the World Refugee Day on Wednesday, the General Secretary of the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP), Tilman Zülch, comments:

As a "Refugee Nation", Germany should also accept refugees and not only recruit qualified employees from abroad!

These days, the Germans are also a nation of refugees, of displaced persons, late repatriates and their descendants. At first, 14 million displaced people came from the eastern territories, followed by four million German late repatriates from the former Soviet Union (USSR), from the Transylvanian region of Romania and Upper Silesia in Poland. From 1949-1989, another 3.8 million refugees came from the former GDR. Tens of thousands were admitted after the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Rupert Neudeck's Cap Anamur rescued almost 11,00 Vietnamese boat people in the South China Sea and brought them to Germany. After the USSR collapsed, 200,000 Jews from the former USSR were accepted as quota refugees – and, last but not least, several groups of refugees were admitted after being displaced by war and persecution in countries of the Third World, for example the Copts, Yesides, Maronite, Assyrian Chaldeans, Kurds, Baha'is, Armenians and Mandaeans.

Germany has become a home for all of these refugees and displaced people and has managed to integrate them quite successfully. About half of the country's inhabitants either belong to one of these groups or has a parent or grandparent who was once a refugee.

Unfortunately, we are observing a dramatic decrease in population. In 2050, there will already be twelve million people less living in Germany. Entire villages will be abandoned, and whole regions will be deserted. Some day soon, the pensions of older people will no longer be affordable. At the same time, young, motivated and able-bodied refugees – or even their children who were born here – are deported, although lots apprenticeship places in various companies continue to remain vacant due to lack of applicants.

Our politicians are calling for skilled workers, expecting other countries to educate them. In May 2011, the head of the job agency (Agentur für Arbeit), Frank-Jürgen Weise, predicted that more than two million skilled workers would be missing in Germany as early as in 2025. So why not accept refugees who are on the run from human rights violations and give them a job-training here? This would be a signal to the world and might help to avoid a demographic disaster in the country.

The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) demands that – as a refugee nation – Germany must try to lead by example in trying to solve the worlds refugee problem. As a first step, Germany could accept about 8,000 to 10,000 unaccompanied refugee minors as residents and stop deporting refugee children who grew up here but were only tolerated for years.