Germany’s welcoming culture for refugees is still very much alive, Archbishop Stefan Hesse, the German Bishops’ Conference’s special representative for refugees and chairman of the Migration Mission, emphasised in an interview for the KNA news agency, weeks before Germany goes to the polls on 24 September, writes Christa Pongratz-Lippitt.
A great many Germans, both in and outside the Church, were still committed to welcoming refugees, Hesse said, adding: “The decisive point is that genuine integration must follow on from the initial welcome. It is imperative to link a welcoming culture to a culture of integration”.
In the Catholic Church alone, he recalled, 100,000 volunteers were engaged in making the refugees feel welcome in Germany. Since 2015, dioceses and charities had set aside €100m and 800 unused church-owned buildings for refugees. At the same time, he said it was important to take seriously the unease many Germans had felt since immigrants sexually assaulted several women during the Cologne new year’s eve celebrations in 2015, and since the terrorist attacks that had followed in 2016.
The influx of refugees could lead to greater competition for jobs, put pressure on wages, make rents rise and lead to problems with schools. “These are real problems … for which solutions must be found,” Hesse said. While it was important to control immigration and to avoid “the chaotic conditions which sometimes prevailed at the borders in 2015”, pursuing a policy of exclusion was out of the question for Christians, he underlined.
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