They are images for the history books. The photos of young men with backpacks and weary faces who set out on foot in September 2015 from Hungary on their way to Austria and Germany. Pictures of fathers with babies on their arms making their way along the Balkan Route. Of women in headscarves holding their children’s hands. Thousands of them, tired of simply hunkering down in the Budapest train station where they had been stuck for days. Most of them had fled the war in Syria or were from the war-torn countries of Afghanistan or Iraq.

They came. A lot of them. And they changed Germany.

There was a before and an after, wrote Angela Merkel in her memoirs. During the night of September 4, 2015, Merkel, who was chancellor at the time, decided that the German federal police officers would not block the refugees at the border. Germany would accept them. In the months that followed, more than a million asylum seekers arrived in the country – an unprecedented number. Never before since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949 had the country seen such a huge wave of migration.

"We can do it,” Merkel had said during a Berlin press conference just a few days earlier. It was her attempt to prepare the Germans for this enormous humanitarian challenge. No sentence during her career in politics ever blew up like that one did, she writes in her autobiography. "No sentence was as polarizing.”

Many Germans were almost euphoric in their welcoming of the newcomers. Some were waiting with teddy bears at the Munich train station as the exhausted travelers showed up. The photo of the drowned Syrian boy Alan Kurdi, who washed up dead on the Turkey’s Aegean coast in early September, had triggered a global outcry – in Germany as well. At the congress halls in Hamburg, long lines of volunteers formed, made up of people eager to help sort clothing donations for the refugees. Many hoped they could be part of the effort to fill Merkel’s sentence with life.

The country was gripped by optimism even earlier in the year, with the left-wing Berlin daily taz writing about German industry’s hope that the wave of refugees from Syria might include badly needed doctors, engineers and technicians.

Others did not share this optimism, and their resentment toward Merkel and her refugee policies grew and grew. They saw the people flowing into Germany as a problem rather than as an opportunity. The Alternative for Germany party (AfD), which Germany’s domestic security agency officially labeled as right-wing extremist in April 2025, began to gain momentum.

Many found themselves confused by the sentence: "We can do it.” It meant nothing and everything. Who is "we”? Everyone? Just policymakers and public officials? And what, exactly, was Germany supposed to "do”? Put up emergency tents in record time so that nobody had to sleep on the street? Ensure that the refugees successfully integrated and stayed forever? Transform into a harmonious multi-cultural and multi-faith society? "Wherever there are obstacles in our way, they must be overcome. We must work to remove them,” Merkel added at the time. To this date, she has never been any more specific.

Ten years have since passed. The number of refugees in the country has climbed from 750,000 in 2014 to 3.3 million by the end of 2024. Almost 1.2 million of them submitted asylum applications in 2015 and 2016, most of them arriving from Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan. In early 2016, Merkel and the EU negotiated a refugee deal with Turkey, which contributed to a significant drop in the numbers. But the trend reappeared following the coronavirus pandemic. Then, in early 2022, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. More than a million people fled to Germany to escape the violence. The country must now take care of them, too.

No other EU member country has accepted as many refugees since 2015 as Germany has. Even in relation to its population, the country is well above average.

It's expensive. Since 2016, the federal government has spent between 13 and 17 billion euros each year to feed, house and process asylum seekers. On top of that are further expenditures made by German states and municipalities along with social welfare payments made to Ukrainians and for refugees whose asylum applications have been accepted. If children are included in the calculations, 44 percent of asylum seekers currently need welfare payments in addition to other forms of state support to live. Among Ukrainians, the figure is almost 60 percent.

Germany has reached its limit. Recent surveys have found that a large majority of Germans would like the country to accept fewer refugees in the future. German new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, campaigned last winter in part on a significant shift to the country’s migration policies, his response to the horrific attack committed by an asylum seeker in summer 2024 at the Diversity Festival in Solingen. The Syrian perpetrator, who had arrived via the Balkan Route in 2022, stabbed three people to death and injured eight others. Such attacks have intensified the migration debate in the country, and they have given the AfD a boost at the ballot box.

The tone in the country has grown rawer, as has how migrants are dealt with. Since Merz entered the Chancellery, Germany’s federal police force has begun rejecting asylum seekers at the border, the legality of which is subject to a fair bit of controversy. In June, Merz justified the step by saying he wants to protect public safety and order in Germany and to prevent cities and municipalities from being overwhelmed.

But has it really become impossible to integrate refugees? Does the country even have to declare a "national state of emergency,” as Merz said last summer? DER SPIEGEL takes a closer look at these and other questions in this article, divided into categories focusing on housing, work, education and security. New arrivals need shelter, they need work and they need education, particularly in the German language so they can become part of society and succeed. And they must be able to live in safety – and abide by the laws of the country – so that peaceful coexistence is possible.

That was the task at hand. We had 10 years. Have we done it?

On a wooden shelf in her room, Sawsan Ibrahim, 29, has placed a framed photo of Jesus Christ. The shelf below holds a number of perfume bottles, all lined up, and images of saints hang on the wall. A Christian from Syria, Ibrahim is comfortable here in the student residence in Hildesheim and is happy to finally have some privacy. It is, she says, "a luxury.” She spent her first two years in Germany in a number of different emergency hostels and group housing facilities, always packed in with numerous others.

She fled the violence in Syria in fall 2015, leaving her family behind in the town of Tartus on the country’s west coast. Nineteen years old at the time, she made her way along the Balkan Route, through Serbia and Austria, all the way to the town of Herborn in Hesse.

In the early days, she found shelter in a large hall, sleeping on a cot next to other refugees. Then, the authorities assigned her to a different hostel. "There were no doors there, either,” she says. "Just curtains.” She stayed for six months before then moving through three additional group housing facilities.

Ibrahim says she only really felt like she had arrived in Germany when she was able to move into her own apartment. She has since found friends and a church community, she says, and is also engaged to be married. Her citizenship application is pending and she will also soon be finished with her studies in pedagogy. She wants to help traumatized children. For this Syrian, the cots lined up in gymnasiums are like a memory from another life.

Sawsan Ibrahim has made it, but not everywhere in Germany are emergency housing facilities a thing of the past. In Berlin, alone, thousands of people continue to live in tents at former Tegel Airport, many of them from Ukraine. Provisional arrangements have essentially become permanent.

The Deutsche Landeskreistag, which represents 294 administrative districts in Germany, recently demanded a complete halt to the acceptance of civil war refugees. Politicians in Berlin must also open their eyes and see "that we can no longer accept and, above all, integrate an endless number of additional refugees,” said Achim Brötel, the association’s president, in an interview.

Is that also the view taken by those local politicians who have demonstrated a particular commitment to the issue? In 2019, 12 municipalities and districts joined forces to create the "Safe Harbor Cities” alliance to show their solidarity with the refugees. Three years later, the alliance included almost 120 members, with large cities like Berlin and Halle joining in addition to smaller towns like Hilchenbach in North Rhine-Westphalia and Sulingen in Lower Saxony. They demanded at the time that they be allowed to accept more asylum seekers than assigned to them by the federal and state governments. That, though, was before Russia launched its full invasion of Ukraine and more than a million people fled to Germany in the blink of an eye. The alliance still exists today.

In April and May, DER SPIEGEL surveyed alliance members in writing for their current assessment of the situation. Seventy-eight of them responded. The result: Fifty-six of the responding administrative districts are not currently operating emergency hostels while 22 must still rely on provisional solutions like tents, gymnasiums or converted office buildings. Dresden continues to house people in emergency container shelters, Nuremberg in Bavaria is using a retirement home adapted for the purpose. Forty-four of the alliance members – and thus, the majority of the respondents – have seen no easing of the situation. Five did not reply to the question. Twenty-nine respondents said that while the number of new arrivals has dipped, there is still an acute lack of housing. In the Bavarian town of Schwabach, for example, refugees who arrived in 2015 and 2016 are still living in a group hostel. Osnabrück wrote: "We are reaching our limits, particularly in the areas of early childhood education and schooling. Placing an additional burden on the system would further exacerbate existing bottlenecks.”

When administrative officials in these places say they are "under heavy strain” and that "there is no improvement in sight,” this is a strong indication that Germany has indeed reached a critical point – and that it has become almost impossible for many agencies to adequately integrate newly arriving refugees.

In Freiburg, there are 2,900 migrants living in public facilities, more than half of them from Ukraine. Accommodation options have been "largely exhausted,” and the private housing market is extremely tight, says city hall. Even though the number of unaccompanied minor refugees has declined, the situation remains difficult because refugees can continue to receive care and support even after they turn 18, city officials wrote.

Some cities are even still home to large shelters where hundreds, or, as in Berlin, thousands of people are living. When a large number of people are packed together in a confined space, the mood can quickly sour. Police visits are often part of everyday life in mass-accommodation facilities.

When it comes to the housing of refugees, in other words it seems that we actually haven’t done it.

The mechanism used by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) for distributing asylum seekers has been facing criticism for some time. Thus far, that distribution has followed a formula based on population figures and tax revenue. The question of whether a specific state has enough vacant apartments, open jobs or desks in schools is irrelevant. Even when it comes to the further distribution within a state to the municipalities, it is largely "left to chance as to whether someone has a good chance of integration,” says Petra Bendel, a political science professor at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg.

Together with a research team from her university, Bendel has developed a new, algorithm-based distribution key. The University of Hildesheim and experts from a number of states and municipalities also took part in the project, which is called "Match’In.” The process includes over 50 different criteria to improve the distribution of asylum seekers. What are the refugees’ needs and abilities? Are any of them interested in studying at university? What occupational skills do they have? Is there a need for specific medical care? The answers to these questions are then "matched” with a specific municipality’s situation. Are there sufficient housing spots available? What about daycare? What does the healthcare sector look like? "The test phase produced promising results,” says Bendel. "Better distribution could significantly improve the situation for local authorities and thereby restore confidence in refugee policy.” Several states are planning to continue working with Match’In in the future, she says.

Even 10 years after 2015, the task has not come to an end. The people are here, and most of them are going to stay. What has not yet been achieved, still can, still must be achieved.

Mohamad Albdiwi, 25, closes the hood of a black Audi. Car tires are stacked next to the lifting platform in his garage in southern German town of Hechingen, light flooding through the high windows. He wipes his hands with a rag and walks into the office next door. From there, he can see if customers are arriving.

"I’m not sure if we would have started our own business if we had known what was coming,” says Albdiwi, from Syria. The bureaucracy, the financial risk, the long days. The beginning was "incredibly difficult,” he says. On top of that, his application for German citizenship still hasn’t been approved, with processing taking forever. "Everything is more difficult without a German passport,” he says. "Whether you’re trying to get a new mobile phone contract or applying for a loan.”

Ten years have passed since Albdiwi fled from Syria to Germany. He and his family are originally from Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. Bombings, power outages and hunger were a constant presence during his childhood following the 2011 outbreak of the civil war.

In Germany, he completed a training course as an electronic technician. "I realized very quickly that I wanted to be my own boss,” he says. Albdiwi’s cousin Imad Srywel, 28, felt the same way. He, too, is from Eastern Ghouta, has been living in Germany since 2014, and is now a master automotive mechatronics technician. In contrast to his cousin, he has already obtained German citizenship. Srywel takes a seat on one of the sofas in the office. "It’s going better and better,” he says. "We invest every extra euro into the shop.”

What the two Syrians have managed to achieve with their company is far beyond the norm. Those who have to leave their homeland in wartime often face almost insurmountable hurdles on the labor market of their new homes, particularly when starting their own business. The language, the challenges of the job, the complex bureaucracy. On top of that comes the possible trauma stemming from experiences back home or while fleeing the violence. Processing such experiences takes time and effort.

"On the whole, though, things are going significantly better than we thought they might 10 years ago,” says Herbert Brücker of the Institute for Employment Research in Nuremberg. Around three-quarters of the men who arrived in 2015, he says, have found work, according to a 2022 survey. Most of them have full-time employment, while others have part-time jobs or have started their own businesses like Albdiwi and Srywel. The data comes from a representative survey regularly performed among refugees by the IAB in cooperation with the Socio-Economic Panel and BAMF.

That’s the good news. But a deeper look into the statistics reveals a number of shortcomings. Only a third of women were employed eight years after arrival – and in the statistics, even those who work just a single hour per week are considered employed. Which means that two out of every three women who fled to Germany perform no work for pay at all.

One explanation for that low number, of course, is the traditional gender roles prevalent in many countries of origin, write the authors of a study released by the German Institute for Economic Research. It is difficult to change these structures, particularly because two-thirds of migrant women also didn’t work for pay before fleeing their homelands.

Making things more difficult is the fact that in some regions of Germany, there is a shortage of daycare opportunities. Mothers who are responsible for raising children have less time to learn German or to work.

On the whole, the earning capacity of refugees in Germany is rather low. On average, those who have work and who have been in Germany for at least seven years only earn a bit more than minimum wage. Almost 20 percent need welfare assistance to make ends meet. Those who attended school for only a few years or not at all in Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea or Iraq are usually only able to find poorly paid assistant jobs.

It is not a small group. Some 45 percent of adult refugees who arrived in Germany between 2014 and 2016 said they either never went to school or left before completing their school leaving certificate. That is the result of a special evaluation performed by the Socio-Economic Panel on behalf of DER SPIEGEL.

The majority of adult refugees, 84 percent, had no proof of professional qualifications from abroad – neither from a company nor from a vocational school or university. Even if one were to count vocational training without a completion certificate, 77 percent of refugees said they had received no professional training. Only 12 percent said they had completed a university degree.

Ensuing years, though, have seen a positive development: Six to eight years after arrival in Germany, the share of those with no professional training dropped 15 percentage points, from 84 percent to 69 percent. The share of those with a university degree rose to 20 percent. Most of them are likely to be in great demand on Germany’s labor market.

But is it enough? Can it be counted as a success? Not really. On the one hand, the fact that the majority of men who fled to Germany have found work a decade after the refugee fall of 2015 is a good thing, even if not all of them earn enough to make ends meet. On the other hand, though, many are still having difficulties learning the language and are poorly educated – problems particularly pronounced among the women refugees.

How can the barriers to entry into the labor market be lowered? Many company heads say: By lowering the administrative hurdles faced by their personnel departments. "In surveys, companies identify bureaucratic hurdles and language problems as the greatest obstacles when it comes to hiring refugees,” says Marlene Thiele, who leads a network at the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry that aims to help companies integrate refugees. Companies frequently have to contend with lengthy approval processes, non-transparent decisions and endless paperwork.

To simplify the path through the bureaucratic jungle for both companies and refugees, and to bring the two sides together, the state of Baden-Württemberg launched an initiative (known as the Kümmerer Project) involving specially trained employees helping migrants find a vocational training position and also counselling them once they have completed the program. They also provide assistance to the companies in question. There are now around 50 such advisers around the country – and last year, they provided their services to around 1,400 migrants, with around half of them finding a vocational training position.

Some companies even advertise training positions specifically for refugees and migrants who do not possess good German language skills. There is also a program, known as "Ausbildung Plus 1,” which gives young people an extra year to finish their training. Twelve industrial companies in Baden-Württemberg are currently taking part in the program.

German teacher Adriana Killian distributes cards to prepare her students for the oral examination. The cards have keywords written on them, like "mother tongue” or "hobbies.” The young men and women must then say a couple of sentences based on the keywords. "Ich heiße Ali,” says a boy in a hoodie sitting in the back row. "My name is Ali.” He continues in German: "My mother tongue is Arabic. Hobby computer games.”

Sixteen students are enrolled in this German class for beginners at the Erich Bracher School in the town of Kornwestheim in Baden-Württemberg. Most of them are refugees from Syria or Afghanistan, but some come from Somalia and Ukraine.

It’s the next student’s turn: "I am from Macedonia. I play football in the local club. It’s a lot of fun.” Compared to the others, the teenager speaks pretty good German. "The levels are quite different,” says Killian, the teacher. "You can tell immediately if someone gets out a lot and has extensive contact with Germans.” Many of the boys, though, live in shared accommodations and have little interaction with German society, she says. One of her students from Afghanistan has huge difficulties with written German, says Killian. He worked as a shepherd back home and never attended school. "Someone like that obviously faces extremely high hurdles,” she says.

Most of the more than 300,000 children and teens who arrived as part of the huge, 2015 refugee wave have long since grown out of school age. No nationwide survey has been conducted to determine what school-leaving certificates they earned and how their lives have since developed.

There are, however, studies showing that migrant schoolchildren do not receive sufficient support. On average, they lag far behind pupils who were born in Germany. Ninth graders who were born abroad, for example, are almost four school years behind in reading than those in their age cohort who do not have immigration backgrounds. Those who migrated as teenagers face particular difficulties. The last PISA study arrived at a sobering conclusion. "It is clearly apparent that first-generation youths are not being successfully integrated into the German education system,” it reads.

Especially in the months following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, many school principals and teachers found themselves wondering how, exactly, they were expected to meet the new challenge. At the same time, significantly more people again began arriving in Germany from the Middle East following the pandemic.

Oliver Schmider isn’t just the principal of the Erich Bracher School in Kornwestheim, he also coordinates the five other vocational schools in the Ludwigsburg administrative district. Currently, a total of 20 so-called VABO classes are running in the schools, more than ever before. VABO classes prepare students, primarily linguistically, for vocational training programs. Baden-Württemberg introduced the offer in its current form in the 2013-2014 school year. Three such classes are running at the Erich Bracher School, with Adriana Killian teaching one of them. Another is a literacy course. "Essentially, our teachers are providing early childhood education to some of the students,” says Schmider.

Many of the teenagers, quite a few of whom are also dealing with trauma of some sort, need several years before they are ready to begin a vocational training course. "There are a number of wonderful success stories,” says Schmider. "Young people who really dedicate themselves and who complete their training as skilled workers in retail or warehouse logistics.” But many don’t make it. "We’ve been doing our best for years to help people find success in the school system,” he says. "But we are reaching the limits of what we can do.”

In 2023, 44 percent of the vocational training contracts for trainees from countries of refugee origin like Afghanistan or Eritrea were prematurely dissolved. Of those who remained, more than a quarter were unable to pass their exams. One of the biggest reasons, according to a survey conducted among companies in Bavaria, is that refugee apprentices were overwhelmed during their vocational training courses due to insufficient language skills and prior schooling.

The 10 years after "we can do it” have also shown that the German school system on the whole isn’t in good shape. According to the Standing Conference of Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the German states, there is a shortage of thousands of teachers in the country, particularly at vocational schools. Precisely in those schools where many migrant youths end up.

If you ask education experts about what needs to happen to improve the situation, many express their frustration at the lack of willingness among policymakers to embark on a reform of the education system. "We had plenty of time following the experiences gleaned in 2015 and 2016 to make the system more immune to crisis,” says Kai Maaz, head of the Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education in Frankfurt.

Like many experts, Maaz believes the distribution of refugees inside Germany and at the various schools is part of the problem. When children are assigned to schools that are already facing extreme challenges, they point out, the problems are magnified. Many vocational schools, for example, have been completely overwhelmed, while hardly any refugees have ended up at the county’s top-level high schools.

One can see the period since 2015 as a kind of stress test for a system that has significant weaknesses even without the added pressure of integrating refugees. German schools have been in crisis for more than 10 years, but the large number of newcomers have significantly exacerbated their problems.

On the other hand, one grows with the job at hand. The challenges posed by refugees can also lead to innovation and to useful answers to difficult questions. They are often small things, local initiatives, pragmatic approaches in all corners of the country.

When it comes to education, one of those innovative ideas is the program in Hamburg called "23plus.” Twenty-three schools in disadvantaged areas, with below-average student performance and a high proportion of children with foreign roots, were to achieve an improvement with scientific support. The project was so successful that it grew to around 40 schools.

The approach: Experts from the field of education research have developed tools to promote learning – including, for example, a mandatory period of daily reading at primary schools: 20 minutes long, at the same time every day. The older children read alone or in pairs, while teachers in the lower grades read aloud to their classes. Not only have the children’s reading skills improved as a result, but so have their math skills, because they now have a better understanding of the tasks being asked of them.

In 2021, a nationwide initiative was launched, operating under similar principles. Two hundred schools are part of the program, which is funded by state and federal governments.

Time and again, violent crimes and Islamist-motivated attacks committed by migrants have unsettled the country over the last 10 years. There were the mass sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015/16, with most of the accused coming from North Africa. There was the Islamist attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016 by Anis Amri of Tunisia. The attack killed 13 people and injured and traumatized many more, some seriously. More recently, the deadly knife attacks in Brokstedt, Solingen and Aschaffenburg.

But what does the situation look like behind the headlines?

Only a small portion of the people who come to Germany as asylum seekers commit crimes. Nevertheless, the issue of crime committed by foreigners continues to be a focus of public debate. And it is usually an emotional one. That isn’t just a function of the horrific attacks that have received such intense media coverage, but also because non-German suspects are over-represented in Germany’s crime statistics. They are responsible for more than 43 percent of registered acts of violence, including assault, murder and robbery. But foreigners only make up 15 percent of the German population. In relation to their share of the population, Afghans, Iraqis, Moroccans and Syrians are responsible for most of these crimes.

There are many reasons for this statistical anomaly. The factors that turn men violent, say experts – regardless of nationality – include a low level of education, poverty, experience with violence, an environment that accepts violence, macho culture and trauma. Refugees are often in several of these risk categories. Furthermore, young men are much more likely to commit crimes than women. The fact that in 2024, almost 80 percent of asylum seekers in the 16 to 29 age group were male, explains a lot. The share of males in that age group was similar in previous years.

Criminologists are quick to point out that migrants tend to be charged more frequently than Germans without migrant backgrounds. They are also more frequently the victims of crimes, relative to their share of the population at large.

But many people aren’t interested in the details, they just want to feel safe. Many are also concerned that refugees, like the assailant in Mannheim, could become radicalized in Germany. The man, who arrived in Germany as an unaccompanied minor from Afghanistan in 2013, killed a policeman on a central square in Mannheim last year. His murder trial is currently underway in Stuttgart. The defendant says that the situation in Gaza had agitated him so much that he decided to kill infidels. He had online contact with an Islamist, which is how he radicalized.

The fact that the Middle East conflict has the potential to radicalize people from certain milieus is also reflected in statistics on politically motivated crimes. Last year, police registered 7,328 such crimes, a rise of almost 68 percent. But there has also been accelerated radicalization on the right wing. Quite a few of them are hostile to Muslims. With almost 43,000 right-wing motivated crimes – more than in any other area – there was also a sharp increase: over 48 percent. Just under 10,000 crimes were attributed to the left wing, representing an increase of around 28 percent.

In total, the police registered more than 84,000 politically motivated crimes, the highest number since the statistical category was introduced in 2001. The extreme fringes of society are becoming stronger, ideological conflicts are growing more intense and the divides are getting more difficult to bridge. This is putting more pressure on the republic.

A CONCLUSION

This year, too, it is likely hanging in a few offices, living rooms or kitchens: The AfD’s "Deportation Calendar.” There are several different editions for 2025. The AfD group in Baden-Württemberg state parliament, for example, has one with the "12 most beautiful deportation airplanes.” The extreme right-wing party has come up with a slogan for each month: "Returning home for a visit? Only with a one-way ticket!” Or: "Have a nice trip, habibi!” The word habibi is Arabic for "my dear.” The AfD in Baden-Württemberg enjoys making dehumanizing jokes. Politicians from the party have repeatedly called for "millions of people to be sent back home.”