Some weeks ago our News-plattform www.Oplatz.net was contacted by Emilie Hoogland from the “Debating”-plattform www.DebatingEurope.eu to participate in a “debate” with the central question of “Does housing asylum seekers apart from locals increase tensions?” which was followed by “3 questions from 3 young Europeans“.
A person from Oplatz.net who is an activist from the “Lager Moblisation Network Berlin” took over those questions and answered them – somehow those responses did not make it to the “dabate”, so we want to present them here on our website; here are the questions and answers that werent published on www.DebatingEurope.eu:
1) DebatingEurope/question: James says segregation makes it more difficult to integrate people into society. So, how can we avoid the segregation of asylum seekers?
– i agree with james and there are many layers inside the question:
0. segregation is was and will be racist, oppressive, unhuman and just wrong.
1. before thinking about “the” aslyumseekers and how they can integrate to “our” society, maybe we should go the other way around and find other ways to overcome this idea of “a minority needs to integrate into a majority” – because there is also the idea of “inclusion” so that “we both together make something new together”.
2. all human rights to all human-beings: what means we need to stop being hypocrites about the “human-rights” when it comes to asylumseeking human-beings – “asylum/refugee-rights” are not the full human rights, so we and our governements are taking them away from the asylumseeking human-beings but want them to be good citizens, when in reality they can (!) not; only citizens enjoy the full human rights in europe, so we need to stop that before asking others to behave, integrate etc. its our human duty first to solve this situation because we have more rights that they do.
3. there is no such thing as “the” asylumseekers/refugees etc. – they are just people but born in a different place; that means there is no such homogenegous group; therefor there we need very defined solutions for different sub-groups and their situation (sex, education, age, family-constelation etc.) to find out how we can operate the best.
2) DebatingEurope/question: Peter suggests that housing asylum seekers separately might be a good thing, because it means they can be slowly introduced into society when they are more accustomed to the culture. Do you agree?
the asylumseeking people are threated exactly the way peter suggests at least in berlin-germany the last 1,5 years, mostly in emergency-shelters directly inside the city-area; but the problem was and still is the mass-storaging of people remains industrial, dehumanizing, stigmatizing and if there is no such thing as a decent normal/general daily routine in life, people wont find no way to come in touch with the citizens. in berlin are most of those people still in camps with no perpective but staying inside the camps, having very low-profiled contacted to outside and wasting their lifetime as being human-worked-on-objects for the companies who run those camps for their own citizen-workers and profit – its actually a contemperary passive slavery they are forced into.
3) DebatingEurope/question: Darius argues that segregation is caused ultimately by language barriers. So, is teaching asylum seekers to speak German more important than where they are housed?
yes and no.
yes: because the german adminstration of the asylum-offices are pretty racist (especially in small cities) in their daily work and wont sometime communicate with people even they speak full english, plus the burocratic paperwork is almost never translated so people can find their way through this scaring asylum-system.
no: it still matters where people live -(points in the 2nd question)- because u need some people who u can practice with; if people are are kept outside the city in townships where almost no german language is needed, the motivation to learn it will be destroyed in the long term – and do not forget: segration is not a natural thing: the racist german governement is the force who builds those camps where they are, and its the the same racist governement who forces the people to live there.
Berlin, 18. April 2017 – Lager Mobilisation Berlin