antoine-roquentin:

Refugee children pose another challenge. Statistics from KMK, the national body representing education ministers from the 16 federal states, indicate that 325,000 refugee children and adolescents were integrated into the German school system in 2014 and 2015. They now comprise 2 percent of all schoolchildren nationwide. To address their needs, schools need additional teachers and social workers trained to work with traumatized children.

An informal SPIEGEL ONLINE poll of officials in the German states in the spring, found that 12,000 new teachers had already been hired. But GEW, a union representing educators and scientists, estimates that more than 20,000 teachers are still needed. Some state education ministries have already written to retirees asking them to return to work, indicating a lack of applicants for the new positions.

In its current report on education, KMK also assumes that up to 58,000 additional daycare spots are needed for the children who arrived in Germany in 2015 alone. To provide adequate care, up to 9,400 additional daycare professionals are needed. 

Federal Environment and Building Minister Barbara Hendricks, a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), has tripled funding for the construction of subsidized housing to 1.5 billion euros ($1.68 billion) for 2018. Hendricks is also pushing for the repeal of a constitutional amendment that went into effect in 2006, that shifts responsibility for construction of social housing entirely to the state level. Under those rules, the federal government is only authorized to provide the states with financial assistance for subsidized house until 2019. But Hendricks has argued that Germany is suffering from an acute shortage of social housing and that the problem is too large for the states to handle on their own….

Germans were alarmed by the New Year’s Eve assaults in Cologne. Had Germany introduced a crime problem by allowing the refugees into the country? Of course, the normal statistical probability also applies to refugees. In any group of a million people, there are bound to be those who do not abide by the law.

But the statistics compiled by the authorities also show that the probability is no higher among refugees than in the domestic population. According to police crime statistics, the number of criminal acts increased by about 4 percent in 2015 over the previous year. The increase was mainly attributable to a rise in asylum- and visa-related offences. If these offences are factored out of the equation, the number of criminal acts remained virtually constant, even though the number of people in the country had increased by hundreds of thousands.

In one respect, the refugee crisis has led to an increase in crime statistics. But in this case the migrants are the victims, not the perpetrators. This year, the BKA has already recorded 665 assaults on refugee accommodations. There were 1,031 such assaults in 2015, or five times as many as in the previous year.

it’s a good thing we’ll never have all the hardships of inviting a million refugees to live with us in north america

Germany, after taking in more than a  million refugees in a short span of time, has had to spend money creating thousands of jobs & social housing, when that money could have been used to give tax cuts to capitalist oligarchs & the 1%!  And now all those thousands of newly-hired teachers, social workers, and civil servants will spend their paycheques in their towns and cities, boosting the local economy, when that money could have gone into some billionaire’s offshore bank account.  WHAT A DISASTER FOR GERMANY!

As the refugees learn the language, get jobs, & start their own businesses, you can expect that they’ll be paying into the German tax system far more than any costs associated with hosting & integrating them, which has been the case in virtually any Western country that has taken in refugees.  OH PEGIDA - WHY DID WE NOT LISTEN TO YOUR MYOPIC, RACIST NONSENSE???

Sadlarious.