He showed me pictures on his cell phone of men, women and children sleeping in tents and containers inside the warehouse-like building, where fights regularly break out between residents who spend hours every day in queues for food, showers and laundry facilities.

Similar makeshift arrangements are cropping up all over Germany, and while the German Red Cross and other NGOs and volunteers are doing their best to provide the basic needs of the asylum seekers, the latter are forced to spend longer and longer in such places while they wait to register their asylum claims, which have to be made in person. Bottlenecks in local government offices also mean numbers trying to register have to be controlled.

“I’d like to get my papers and go somewhere else. I want to go to Berlin,” said Asmir, who knows very well he can’t leave Heidenau or access any state support until he is bussed to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) branch in Chemnitz, the only place in Saxony to register asylum claims.

The maximum wait to be registered used to be three months, but Germany’s lower house of parliament recently passed legislation that, if approved by the upper house, will extend the amount of time asylum seekers can spend in temporary reception centres to six months, an indication of further expected delays ahead.

BAMF says it is hiring 2,000 more employees to process claims, but according to Andrea Hübler, a counsellor with Opferberatung, a Dresden-based NGO, “nothing is happening and there’s too much bureaucracy.”

“You can’t keep people in these camps indefinitely,” she said. “We can give them food and clothing, but they want a life.”

The registration delays only lengthen the time it takes to identify so-called economic migrants who are further clogging up an already overwhelmed asylum system. The recently passed legislation included extending Germany’s list of “safe” countries of origin to include Kosovo, Albania and Montenegro. Serbia, Macedonia and Bosnia are already on the list. Applications from these Balkan countries made up 38 percent of the 303,400 asylum applications that Germany received between January and September this year.

In theory, asylum claims from these countries will now be speedily rejected and the asylum seeker deported. But in reality, Germany’s record for enforcing return orders has been poor. Of 128,290 people found to be “illegally present” in the country in 2014, only 27 percent were ordered to leave, and fewer than 22,000 were forcibly returned, according to Eurostat figures.

Mohamed Abu-Baker, 25, from Libya, one of the students in Fischer’s class, has already had his asylum claim rejected because he was fingerprinted on arrival in Italy and, under the EU’s Dublin Regulation, Italy is therefore responsible for processing his asylum claim. German authorities sent him back to Italy but he simply returned and is now living in refugee housing, receiving a living allowance and even an additional financial incentive to attend the German classes, although he lacks the right to work. He has yet to receive a return order.

“Germany is the best place, (be)cause the government respects you,” he said.

In the long-term, integration for people like Abu-Baker will be virtually impossible and their presence in the country provides further fuel for a growing anti-migrant backlash that has been particularly pronounced in Saxony.

According to Germany’s "Königstein Key", which determines how asylum seekers are distributed across the country’s 16 federal states based on their populations and tax revenue, Saxony is expected to take in 5.1 percent of the new arrivals. It doesn’t sound like a lot until you consider that at least 800,000 asylum seekers are expected to arrive in Germany by the end of this year, meaning that Saxony will have to absorb about 41,000 new residents into its population of four million.

It will represent a significant demographic shift for a state where, before the current influx, recent migrants made up just 1.3 percent of the population and only 1 percent of the population practised religions other than Christianity as of 2011.



Until recently, Pirna’s exposure to diversity consisted of little more than a couple of Chinese restaurants and a handful of immigrants who were kept at arm’s length. As in many other parts of former Eastern Germany, foreigners, particularly those who are not Christian, are often regarded with suspicion and sometimes outright hostility.

PEGIDA, an anti-Islam, anti-migrant movement, started last October in Dresden, just a half hour’s drive from Pirna, and is linked to a doubling in the number of racist attacks on foreigners in the state, according to Opferberatung, which provides support to victims of hate crimes.

“As soon as it’s announced that new refugee housing will be opened, you can be sure that they’ll try to stop it,” said Hübler of Opferberatung. “Last night, Nazis burned down an old school that was going to house refugees in Prohlis [a Dresden district].”

German authorities have recorded more than 490 such attacks on asylum seeker housing this year, double the number for the whole of last year. Two-thirds of the attacks were carried out by local citizens with no previous criminal record.



PEGIDA (which stands for Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West) was initially viewed as appealing to a small minority of right-wing extremists, but its vehement opposition to Germany’s policy of welcoming refugees is attracting increasing support from ordinary people who probably wouldn’t describe themselves as neo-Nazis. The grassroots movement celebrated its first anniversary last week with a rally in Dresden that attracted more than 10,000 people.