European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016 | Page 18

Immigrants, ISIS the Refugee Crisis, and Integration in Europe

who speak German 200 years after their
ancestors arrived, is not relevant, as they
presumably speak Portuguese as well. It
is essential that all immigrants, including
refugees, master the language of their new
country; if they also speak their home
language, and perhaps several more, that
is only to their advantage. I was unsure
if von Beyme was criticizing or endorsing
the move to limit social subsidies, but
it is in any case advisable (indeed, if a
figure such as Andrea Nahles endorses
this measure, the argument is clearly
overwhelming). Excessively high income
support can serve as a magnet effect
and can encourage incorporate into the
welfare state rather than the labor market.
The “welfare wage,” as the founder of the
British social state, William Beveridge,
recognized, cannot be above the working
wage. Public resources should not be
spent on keeping young people idle (the
average age of refugees is 30) but, rather,
on giving them training and educational
opportunities. Here the Germans are
getting it right: the emphasis in discussions
of refugee integration has been on work,
and the Arbeitsagentur has rolled out
a program in some federal Länder that
allows refugees to demonstrate their skills
through a few weeks’ work in German
firms; if they can do the job, they get the
job without the formal qualifications. It is
a clever move and an unusual innovation
in the otherwise overly bureaucratized
German labor market (Koschnitzke
2016). The Ministry of Education had
already rolled out a program allowing
refugees to demonstrate their credentials
when they had no documentation on their
qualifications, which was often destroyed
in war or lost on the refugee trek, or even
knowledge of German (Böse, Tusarinow,
and Wünsche 2016). In this context, the

unrelated decision, designed to appease
the British, to reduce benefits to the rate
applicable where an EU migrant worker’s
family is residing is another step in the
right direction: free movement within the
EU, like migration (though not refugee
flows) to the EU, should be about work.

The issue of jihadist radicalization
mentioned by von Beyme is a real
one, but it has little to do with current
immigration flows, refugees included.
Those radicalizing are longstanding
migrants and often citizens of European
societies who turn, for reasons that are
not fully comprehended, to an ideology
that understands nothing but fear, death,
violence, and theocratic slavery. They
have more to do with the Red Army
Fraction than they do with refugees. The
latter, above all the Syrians, know all too
well what ISIS is and what it stands for.

The institutional and statist
developments
that
von
Beyme
highlights—a fragmentation of the
European party system, a slowing of the
European integration process, and an
expansion of state power in the face of
terrorism—are indisputably underway,
with some variation between the member
states. Some of these trends, such as an
expansion in repressive state powers,
will be hard to check given the very real
jihadist threat, which is not to say that
no effort should be made. For the EU, the
slowing of integration is only inevitable if
we maintain the fiction that all ships must
move at the same speed. The refugee crisis
made it clear that the commitment of some
member states to the Union—Britain (no
surprise there) and Eastern European
states—is largely instrumental, or at least
deeply constrained by nationalism and/
or nativism. There is a strong case for a
multispeed Europe in which Germany
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