Reception Policies, Practices and Responses – Germany Country Report

The report focuses on reception policies and practices in Germany between 2011 and 2018. In the reporting period, Germany has received more than two Million asylum applicants, mainly from Syria, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, but also from the Balkans as well as North and sub-Saharan Africa. Within Germany, there are two major legal sources related to reception, i.e. the Asylum Act (Asylgesetz) and the Asylum Seekers Benefits Act (Asylbewerberleistungsgesetz). The Asylum Act outlines the process under which asylum is applied for and granted in Germany. The Asylum Seekers Benefits Act defines specific government benefits for asylum seekers including monthly payments for living expenses and health care services. The crosscutting and multilevel nature of reception fosters an incoherence of migration policies and practices within and across different levels of migration governance (European, national, regional, municipal). This fragmentary constellation is reinforced by the federalist and corporatist structure of the German polity and, in effect, leads to substantial insecurity of both asylum applicants and immigration administrators. Since 2015, reception policies have increasingly adopted a paradigm of “Integrated Refugee Management” which builds on logics of detention and control and involves a set of punitive measures to sanction non-compliance. The isolationist nature of this approach can severely compromise the capabilities of refugees and entails the risk of impeding social and structural integration. Although speeding up asylum decisions has become a central policy goal since 2015, our data points to many instances of protracted reception, i.e. a continuance of refugees within the reception regime for more than six months. An important reason apart from the high numbers of applications in the years 2015 and 2016 has been the frequent relocation of asylum applicants within Germany - “politics of dispersal”