Anker Zentrum: Fürstenfeldbruck

    Arriving at the Anker Zentrum in Fürstenfeldbruck, I had no idea what to expect: I had never visited a refugee camp before and I was anxious to learn about the German asylum process. Once escorted through the tightly secured gates, we followed the staff as they interviewed clients and aided them in the German asylum process. German social workers explained to us not just how they operated the asylum facility, but also the building’s dark history. The building had been used as a Wehrmacht military barracks, complete with Nazi decorative symbols still visible across the premises. Many refugees had no knowledge of these symbols, and it didn’t bother them, but some understood and many Jewish refugees refused to be housed there. It was an eerie feeling to be learning about the atrocities committed at Dachau and the development of right-wing fascism in Munich, while volunteering at a migrant facility hosted in a former Nazi barracks.

    While at the camp, we learned that there was a stark contrast between the treatment of white clients versus darker-skinned African or Middle Eastern clients, regarding the asylum process timeline. We saw few Ukrainian refugees: they were typically ushered through the system quickly and given housing within a few weeks of their arrival at the camp. But many darker-skinned clients had been languishing in the camp for years, with little hope for asylum and constant worries about deportation back to their respective conflict-stricken homelands. We learned that suicide was a very common issue in the center: refugees saw death as the only alternative to deportation. The staff understood all of this as well, but were very limited in their capability to change the system. They worked as hard as they could for every client they were given, and constantly told us about how unfair it was that Ukrainian migrants receive priority over Afghan or Nigerian migrants.

 

    From these experiences, I learned about deficits in migration policymaking and how racism degrades German migration policy. The German federal government is upheld as a role-model for migration, yet takes little effort to maintain a consistently humane immigration policy across each of its states. Lawmakers enact exclusionary policies in the name of the German people, designed to sequester away groups of people deemed unassimilable. Outside of legislation, it was simply clear that the bureaucrats reviewing casework for migrants tended to favor lighter-skinned applicants. Their experiences reminded me of the dangers of xenophobic thought, while my time volunteering in the migrant camps taught me the extent through which pervasive anti-migrant rhetoric still directs national migration policymaking.