The number of asylum seekers seeking refuge in Hesse rose significantly in the last quarter of the year. The complaint of the cities and districts that no longer know how to adequately accommodate and care for the newcomers is unmistakable. Just last week, the Darmstadt regional council, which is responsible for distributing refugees among the municipalities in Hesse, spoke of a further 18,000 people who would need accommodation in the state by the end of the year. For comparison: According to the Ministry of Social Affairs in Wiesbaden, 16,177 asylum seekers were registered in Hesse this year by the end of September. In the entire previous year there were 17,900. But by New Year’s Eve 2023, Hesse is expected to have accepted almost 34,200 refugees.
Most of the people who have applied for asylum here this year come from Afghanistan, Turkey and Syria. In addition, by the middle of this month, 4,808 Ukrainians who fled to Hesse from the war in their country were recorded in the Central Register of Foreigners, the Interior Ministry said. Since they have a different status than asylum seekers, they are recorded in different statistics. Although many refugees from Ukraine are staying with relatives and friends in Germany, providing them with adequate language and integration courses also poses a challenge.
In the past nine years, Hesse has also faced major tasks in ensuring humanitarian care for people who have fled war, persecution or economic hardship. It is now foreseeable that the current discussions on a Migration Pact II in Berlin, which is intended to make deportations easier, will not bring any short-term relief for the countries, but at most a medium-term relief; the number of migrants will initially continue to rise.
The path into the German job market is long for refugees: first they have to learn the language, then usually an integration course and the struggle for recognition of foreign vocational training follows. The Migration Pact II currently being prepared in Berlin is intended to make this path easier, but it cannot be avoided entirely. Nevertheless, more and more refugees found work in Hesse – but only years after their arrival.
Since 2016, when a similar number of people came to Hesse as in 2022, the number of employees in this group of people has increased, says a spokeswoman for the regional directorate of the employment agency. As of March 31, a total of around 271,000 people were employed in the state subject to social security contributions, including almost 37,000 refugees. That is an increase of around 10,000 people (plus 37 percent) compared to March 2020 with around 27,000 people. According to the spokeswoman, the number of refugees in marginal employment rose from 4,900 to around 7,500 (plus 53 percent) in the same period.
Niklas Záboji, Paris Published/Updated: Recommendations: 149 Monika Ganster Published/Updated: Recommendations: 2 Timo Steppat, Wiesbaden Published/Updated: Recommendations: 42
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