Most Are Educated and Want to Work: Characterizing Refugees and Competing Economic and Humanitarian Narratives of the “Refugee Crisis” in Germany

When the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees published its first descriptive findings on the refugees who have been arriving in Germany since mid-2015, the take-home message was that many: are educated, have work experience, want to work, and are ambitious about their children’s educational future. The characterization of refugees in reference to traits pertinent to characterizing economic immigrants (skills, education, work experience) shows that this population is caught in the “migration-asylum nexus.” In other words, they can be seen as either “illegal” economic immigrants or “legitimate” asylum-seekers, as both groups share motivations to migrate (economic ambition, social/political hardship, physical danger, etc.) and rely increasingly on smuggler operations to circumvent restrictive admissions policies. Deciding who is who involves considerable interpretive work on the part of the state, and begins with descriptive characterizations.

In this paper, I examine how refugees arriving in Germany over the past year been characterized in political discourse, and how government, NGO (e.g. unions, employers’ organizations) and academic studies are referenced in those characterizations. Taking descriptive characteristics of this migrant group as a case of “knowledge claims”, I then examine how these claims about refugee traits feed into narratives of the “refugee crisis” and how to resolve it. Characterizations of populations caught in the migration-asylum nexus can be used to support both humanitarian and economic narratives of the crisis. Which of the two narratives gains ground in political discourse will have considerable effects on future policy responses and on those at whom they are directed.