Refugees Daily - Internal Global Press Review

OPINION

I recently read that criminality is on the rise in German towns that have accepted refugees. But it's not the refugees who are responsible for this crime wave: Germans in these towns have been committing arson, damaging property and attacking refugees. In other words, Germans have been making their own worst fears come true. Often the fear of loss leads to the very loss we fear – a principle that holds true not only for jealous lovers but also, it seems, for those who turn to violence out of fear that the refugees will cost them their safety and peace.

The refugees haven't even all been registered yet, but already they raise questions about who we are. Some Germans can imagine what it means to lose everything – hence their empathy; some can imagine what it means to lose everything – hence their fear.

We no longer have a universal frame of reference. Angela Merkel's declaration that refugees are fundamentally deserving of protection – hers was the only declaration of its kind in Europe – has two main sticking points in her own country. First, there's the free-market logic according to which the German government will prohibit neither the export of weapons by German companies to warring nations nor the ruthless exploitation of resources under corrupt systems in Africa, Asia and eastern Europe.

And then there's the ever-growing violence, both verbal and physical, from part of the German population: those who would like to see their country walled off with barbed wire – as is happening in Hungary – or, failing that, to at least have the Berlin government refuse to accept even the ridiculously low numbers of refugees mandated by the European Union – as Poland and the UK have done.

But which "European values" are best upheld with barbed wire and fences, regulations, harassment and attacks? Liberté, égalité, fraternité? Or is this mainly about our own survival? In eastern Germany, you can once again hear people chanting Wir sind das Volk ("We are the people"). In 1989 that sentence opened a border; now it's being used to close a border, to insulate this finally unified Volk from the newcomers, who lack any unity since they are fleeing so many different wars. Are other countries' wars our responsibility? That's a question you hear a lot these days. But no one wants to hear the answer.

Refugees in Germany have been fighting for recognition for nearly 10 years now – people from western and eastern Africa, from Asia and eastern Europe. Syrian refugees have managed to make themselves visible because there are just too many of them to be overlooked. They file across our television screens during news bulletins. They arrive at rail stations in the middle of our cities. They camp in tents and emergency shelters.

Heartwarming numbers of individuals have stepped forward to offer help, and there is still moral support from an increasingly isolated Merkel. But the temporary exceptions to the rules of the Dublin III regulation, made to help the refugees from Syria, are already being revoked, and the chancellor herself vowed at her party conference last week to "tangibly reduce the number of refugees arriving".

There are other groups of refugees whose primary occupation for years has been waiting: either legal waiting in asylum-seekers' housing or illegal waiting in the makeshift shelters maintained by churches and private groups. These refugees go on waiting just as before. Under EU rules (the Dublin regulation again), they are forbidden from seeking employment in any European country other than the one they first set foot in. And that regulation is now being even more strictly enforced than it was in the past.

So more and more refugees whose applications for asylum Germany is not legally required to process – or who have not filed applications – are being deported to the countries where they first arrived inside the European Union: in most cases, Italy or Greece. This means they are knowingly being condemned to unemployment, homelessness and starvation, cynically advised by German bureaucrats to "show some initiative".

In practical terms, what is happening is that victims of war whose status as war victims is uncontested often find themselves with no other alternative than to resort to prostitution or criminal activity. And any among them who are found to have returned to Germany in violation of these rules are subject to up to three years' imprisonment, according to information being circulated by the foreigners registration office in Berlin.

The inability of the German agencies responsible for processing asylum requests to keep up with applications reflects a lack of vision common to all EU countries, each of which has been failing in its own way to help the refugees. There is still no general European position on refugees – no overarching, humane plan. Instead we have short-sighted, nationalistic haggling.

Can each problem be "solved" only by creating another one? Why is there no acknowledgment that these people – our fellow human beings – are already here, that all the laws and regulations in the world cannot make them disappear, that they must find places where they can live in peace if they have been fished from the Mediterranean, unloaded from traffickers' vans, or plucked from the undercarriages of lorries?

Sometimes I think about how the people in each of those boats are no different from the rest of us: men, women, and children, among them potential postal workers as well as potential Nobel laureates, plumbers and musicians, office and construction workers, teachers, cabinet-makers, scientists, assembly line workers, sales clerks.

Sometimes I am surprised at how little curiosity there is to meet these people and learn what they have experienced – what moves them, what their abilities, ideas and plans are – and how little interest we seem to take in sharing our world with them. If we find it acceptable to let people like this drown, suffocate or freeze to death, we are also accepting the loss of the infinite capacities that dwell in them just as much as in us. By failing to value them, we show disdain for ourselves as well. One person's deprivation is not another's gain. Or maybe there are gains to be had, in a limited, economic sense. But nothing real.

Sometimes I think we have forgotten that the movement described by these refugees across the Earth's surface is just a reaction to the movement of those who have been violently carving up the world's natural resources with no respect for borders, and that a lack of prospects in exploited countries risks giving rise to extremism. We share an inherent survival instinct, and there is a wealth gap in the world that, like all systems based on difference, seeks equilibrium.

Given these circumstances, our European indifference to the suffering of so many is becoming the frontline of a battlefield. We are waging war, with indifference as our weapon – indifference to those in flight from violence and war. If we in Europe can't share 70 years of peace with others, who in this world will? Even 70 years after the end of our war, we know how the fractured biography of an individual inscribes itself in the lives of the second and third generations – as do memories of comfort and help.

Perhaps we too will soon be among those who must flee from extremist attacks. Perhaps the fear felt by these refugees will soon be our own.

Translated by Susan Bernofsky