Refugee in Germany – 100,000 new “working opportunities”

Last week, Germany’s legislature debated a new law on integration, the country’s first. It requires asylum seekers to take lessons in language, culture and values in exchange for faster access to the labor market. The government has promised to subsidize 100,000 new “working opportunities,” many of them low-paid workfare jobs. Labor laws will be relaxed to make hiring refugees easier.

But newcomers without a job will have to stay in the municipality first assigned to them. Those who reject these rules face cuts to their support. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said ominously: “They will not do well here.”

The purpose of these new measures is to prevent the rise of parallel societies as in Belgium or France—or the ghettos that sprang up in large German cities after the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Turkish “guest workers” beginning in the 1960s.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at  Germany’s grand refugee experiment | Brookings Institution