By Gunnar Schupelius
Children of asylum seekers and refugees cannot be integrated as it should be. This truth is being kept under wraps, says Gunnar Schupelius.
Children of asylum seekers and refugees from the Ukraine can no longer get a place in the welcome classes because they are overcrowded. More than 1600 of them are currently waiting in vain for a place.
An “emergency school” was therefore set up at the end of June in the “arrival center” for Ukrainian refugee children on Tegel airfield. 13 containers offer space for 200 children. There are no regular classes, but the children should be kept busy. It is a “springboard”, said school senator Katharina Günter-Wünsch (CDU), “for future school attendance”.
But that is in the stars, because there is not only a lack of rooms for new welcome classes, but also of staff. Much of this is needed to teach children of foreigners. The district of Tempelhof-Schoeneberg reported in June that five teachers were needed for a welcome class with around 45 students.
A classroom of the “Notschule” in Tegel Photo: Olaf Selchow
The term welcome class was invented in autumn 2015, “when half of Germany was intoxicated by its own humanity,” as Die Zeit editor Anant Agarwala put it. Before that, people spoke of “foreigner classes”. The new name should sound nicer.
The problem remained the same: if too many children who do not speak German at home are gathered in a class to learn German, they learn very poorly.
Based on a comprehensive study in November 2022, the Leibniz Institute for Economic Research in Essen came to the conclusion that welcome students speak and write German less well and also do worse in the natural sciences than foreign children and young people in regular classes.
Actually, one should no longer set up welcome classes at all and all children and young people from abroad would have to be admitted to regular classes. But that’s not possible either, because then the level of performance would drop too much there.
So there are not only too few welcome classes, so that the backlog of waiting children extends to Tegel airfield. Worse still, the welcome classes don’t lead to the integration that would be necessary.
The conclusion from these facts: Berlin is overwhelmed. We’re taking in too many people. It is not possible to adequately care for their children. The Federal Office for Migration recorded 150,166 new applications for asylum in the first six months of this year, 77.5 percent more than in the previous year. The Ukraine refugees are not counted here. More and more migrants are coming to Berlin via the Oder.
Immigration needs to be regulated. But the federal government rejects border controls and the Berlin Senate is not even demanding them.
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