Afghanistan: Hubertus Heil wants to open language courses for refugees – politics

The integration course that Germany offers to refugees lasts a total of 700 hours. They are supposed to study history, law and German culture for 100 hours and learn German for 600 hours. The aim is language level B1, at which people can follow conversations about topics they are familiar with and talk about their own interests and plans. The problem: This course is only paid to refugees from countries with so-called good prospects to stay, most recently Eritrea and Syria. Afghanistan was not one of them. Until recently, people were eventually deported there.

The rise of the Taliban to power has now decisively changed the situation of the Afghans in Germany. There will hardly be any deportations to a country in which the rulers can neither be trusted nor the airport works in the near future. However, this has so far not changed anything in terms of the official assessment of the prospect of staying. Both the Afghan refugees who have been living in Germany for a long time and many of the last rescued remain excluded from the courses. The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bamf), which offers the integration courses, is waiting for a new assessment of the situation from the Foreign Office. New asylum applications from Afghanistan are therefore currently not being processed. They are “re-prioritized”.

At least the Federal Ministry of Labor does not want to wait any longer for such formal justifications. Labor Minister Hubertus Heil decided on Thursday alone to open all integration measures that fall under the responsibility of the Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs (BMAS) to asylum seekers from Afghanistan. Probably from December 2021 on, Afghan asylum seekers will then be able to take part in the professional language courses as well as application and motivation training offered by the Federal Employment Agency.

The Ministry of Labor is opposing the Federal Ministry of the Interior, which has so far held back with an official reassessment. “A corresponding amicable arrangement has not yet been reached with the Federal Ministry of the Interior, for Building and Home Affairs,” confirmed the BMAS Süddeutsche Zeitung. Interior Minister Horst Seehofer “suspended” all deportations to Afghanistan in mid-August. But he has not yet issued an official ban on deportation.

Return not possible in the foreseeable future

In order to confirm the obvious – that deportation flights from Germany will not land in Kabul for the foreseeable future – the Federal Foreign Office is waiting there for the official Afghanistan report. The current status report is from mid-July 2021, i.e. before the Taliban came to power, and, in the opinion of critics, assessed the security situation as too positive even then. It has been revised in the Foreign Office for weeks. At the moment, the last votes are still taking place, one hears from the office.

According to the BMAS, however, a return to Afghanistan is not possible for most asylum seekers in the foreseeable future. The more you want to integrate the newcomers into work and society. Sufficient language skills are an essential prerequisite for this. “In anticipation of the actual circumstances”, the Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs believes it is necessary to open the language course access as early as possible.

Above all, Germany is challenged to integrate the local workers rescued from Afghanistan quickly. All those Afghan helpers who were on the lists of local workers drawn up by the ministries were given a humanitarian residence permit in Germany and were allowed to work immediately. Those who made it into the plane in the chaos of the rescue operation but not on an official list must first apply for an asylum procedure here. You would benefit from the relief announced by Heil.

The integration of the approximately 30,000 Afghans who are actually required to leave Germany is likely to be more difficult. Many of them came to Germany in the great wave of refugees in 2015/2016. They hardly received any language courses because of the poor prospect of staying at the time. Again and again they were banned from working and thus forced into inactivity.

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