Mahmoud Aldaas is one of the lucky ones. The 29 year-old Syrian has been offered a job as a web developer in Hamburg — his first break since setting out from Damascus 21 months ago on his arduous odyssey to the west.
The offer came from Deepblue Networks, a local ad agency, after a three-month internship. It was a relief to be working again, and in a job that was tailor-made for him: back in Damascus, he had run his own web design firm. “I felt like I was getting back in the saddle again,” he says.
Most refugees in Germany are not so fortunate. Some will be lucky to find a job at all, let alone one in the profession they were trained in.
Jürgen Gallenstein, an official of Hamburg’s social services department, fears that unless they’re offered the right opportunities many migrants will end up in the ranks of Germany’s long-term unemployed.
“That would be a catastrophe,” he says.
Germany took in more than 1m refugees last year, an influx that could transform Europe’s largest economy. Business initially saw it as a boon for a country with an ageing population and a flourishing labour market that badly needs more workers.
Dieter Zetsche, chief executive of carmaker Daimler, said they could unleash a new “Wirtschaftswunder” or economic miracle — much as the millions of guest workers from countries such as Turkey helped fuel Germany’s postwar boom.
But as the number of immigrants continues to rise, a new scepticism is creeping in. Germany’s social services are stretched to breaking point, with school gyms overflowing and newly built tent cities filling up fast as a shortage of staff has led to huge backlogs in processing asylum applications. It has proved hard enough to register the newcomers, let alone find them all jobs.
“The authorities just can’t keep up,” says Jan Ladendorf, a Hamburg port worker who has been volunteering to help arrivals navigate the local bureaucracy. He cites the case of Mr Aldaas, whose asylum request is still being processed, even though he’s been in Germany for 14 months. Mr Aldaas says he finds the process “exhausting”.
Mr Gallenstein plays down talk of a new boom. “It was different in the 1960s, with the Turkish immigrants,” he says. “We had a different kind of industry, and a lot of simple work on assembly lines. We don’t have those jobs any more.”
Low-skilled work in the postwar era required “little language but strong muscles” says Mr Gallenstein. “These days, you don’t need muscles, but you do need to be able to speak German.”
Very few of the refugees now coming into Germany do. Indeed, very few have any skills at all. A survey by the federal labour agency in October found 81 per cent of them had no professional qualification or even high-school diplomas — or at least no proof they had any.
Mr Gallenstein says it’s a mixed picture. “We have a man who worked six years as a military doctor, and then young women who have no school education at all.”
Illiteracy is a problem. Many of those who can read and write Arabic don’t know the Latin alphabet.
If refugees can find work anywhere, though, it will be in Hamburg, a city with a huge and busy port that has long been open to foreigners. The city’s labour market is in rude health, with about 3,500-4,000 new vacancies advertised every month.
Meanwhile, Germany is developing new ways to get migrants into jobs as quickly as possible. Previously, asylum seekers were banned from taking up work during the first nine months of their stay in the country: in 2014 that was reduced to three.
Hamburg has gone a step further. Under a programme set up by Mr Gallenstein, scouts work in refugee hostels identifying those with the best chance of gaining asylum — mostly Syrians and Iraqis — and offering them appointments in a new one-stop integration shop. Here they are quizzed by Arabic speakers, themselves former refugees, about their family circumstances, health, education and skills, while their diplomas and professional qualifications — if they still have them — are checked. Counsellors then attempt to match them up with job offers from local businesses.
Authorities are keen to enrol them on courses so they can improve their longer-term job prospects. But many migrants don’t see that as an option, according to Sönke Fock, head of the Hamburg branch of the federal labour agency.
“Some of them are in debt, they feel responsible for the families they left behind at home and they want to earn money fast,” he says. In-work training courses in Germany normally last three years — “and from the point of view of a 20-year-old that’s an eternity,” says Mr Fock.
Even for those with the best job prospects, such as Mahmoud Aldaas, it’s a long road. He can’t start the job at Deepblue Networks until he has a work permit, which he applied for six weeks ago. It’s supposed to take a month at the most.
Like other foreign jobseekers, he had to undergo a “priority review” to see whether there were others — for example, from the EU — who could do the job just as well. The results are pending. He’s still waiting to hear on his applications for asylum and for a residence permit.
Mr Ladendorf says migrants are often flummoxed by German bureaucracy. “They need a lot of help filling in forms,” he says. “But as a rule, many of them are left to their own devices.”
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