Voice Angela Merkel’s Great Escape The chancellor's response to the refugee crisis was going to be her downfall. Then Germany's welfare state kicked in.

Two years ago, German Chancellor Angela Merkel uttered the most resonant, but also the most widely ridiculed, judgment on the refugee crisis just then arriving at the borders of Europe: “wir schaffen das” — “we can do it.” A year later, after staggering numbers of Syrians — and then Iraqis and Afghans and Eritreans and Moroccans — had poured into Germany, and as the country’s fine-tuned bureaucratic machine buckled and at times broke down under the strain, and as refugees were implicated in sexual assaults and terrorist attacks, Merkel felt called upon to concede that “this phrase was a little overstated.” Or perhaps not a little: When I was in Dresden last December, I heard dire predictions that a xenophobic, nationalist party — Alternative for Germany (AfD) — would rise from obscurity to become Germany’s main opposition party, just as was happening in France, Austria, and elsewhere. I have just returned from another trip to Dresden. And I have concluded that Merkel was, in fact, right the first time around — Germany can do it. And by “it” I mean both that it can weather the blow to its politics and that it can absorb a million-odd refugees, most of them ill-educated and poor. The damage that this Category 4 hurricane has left behind is very real. On Sept. 24, when Germany holds its national elections, AfD is projected to win a quarter of the vote in Saxony, the state of which Dresden is capital. The split between a progressive west and a traditionalist and resentful east will deepen. But Merkel is likely to win the election by double digits. As for the problem of “integration,” conversations with the refugees I first met a year ago have shown me how utterly dependent many of them are, and will remain, on German largesse. But Germany has a lot of largesse, and a lot of patience. Merkel’s “das,” consciously or not, encompassed something yet deeper than the absorption of people fleeing the hell of Syria’s war. What has been at stake since the summer of 2015 is Europe’s capacity to honor the values upon which it was built without provoking a political backlash that would put precisely those values in jeopardy. I happened to be at a conference in Salzburg on Labor Day weekend, 2015, when refugees suddenly began filling the trains across Austria and into Germany. Austria was about to hold an election for president, and Norbert Hofer of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria was gaining in the polls every day. As we debated what to say about the refugees, Yoram Dinstein, a distinguished Israeli scholar of international law, said, “If the price of taking the refugees is bringing fascists to power, I hope they turn the refugees back.” That thought has haunted me for the last two years. The fear that Dinstein was right helps explain why I have devoted much of that time to reporting on the refugee crisis and why I am now writing a book about the history and prospects of liberalism. Only two countries, Germany and Sweden, took their moral obligations seriously enough to accept the political risk of throwing open their doors to refugees. Both lived to rue their impulsive generosity and to block new avenues of arrival. Even in countries that essentially turned their back on the refugees, above all the United States and the United Kingdom, fear of refugees, of Muslims, of immigrants, of terrorism tipped elections to the nationalists. The risks have been — and remain — very real. Yet Europe is not today in the place people feared two years ago. This spring, France elected as president Emmanuel Macron, the most vocally pro-refugee of the major candidates, while Holland turned away from the Muslim-hating Geert Wilders. Those elections still had a very sharp existential edge. Not in Germany: Angela Merkel has presided over a consummately boring, pedestrian campaign. And that is the most ringing answer to Yoram Dinstein’s nightmare. People arrive at the registration office for refugees and migrants seeking asylum in Germany, on March 11, 2015 in Berlin. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images) A legal triage necessarily underlies the moral question of according refugee status. Germany could not simply accept the bona fides of the 890,000 people who reached the country in 2015. Like other European nations, Germany chose to extend automatic protection to all Syrians (as well as to virtually all Eritreans). Classic “economic” migrants from peaceful, if often miserable, countries like Kosovo, Pakistan, and Morocco were rejected virtually out of hand. In between were vast numbers of aspirants from Iraq and Afghanistan and several other countries deemed neither wholly safe nor wholly dangerous. Their status was determined on a case-by-case basis. Over time, as Germany tried to reduce the total number of people upon whom it would lavish its program of social support, fewer and fewer Afghans and Iraqis made it through the refugee turnstile. This process was often cruel, and in any case random. Of the half-dozen Iraqis whom I met last year outside the dismal converted Days Inn in which they had been placed, only two, I learned on this visit, had received asylum. One of them, Hussein Hamzi Karim, was a Shiite from Baghdad, a policeman who said that he had been targeted by the Jaish al-Mahdi, a Shiite death squad. That was an extremely odd story, and the fact that Karim had only a sixth-grade education meant that he was unlikely to have been a policeman and perhaps was actually a rival militia member — but the interviewer had believed him. Back in the Days Inn, Karim had been a grim, furious figure who said that he planned to throw himself under a bus to expose Germany’s mercilessness. Now, sitting in his sunny one-room apartment decorated with cut-out flowers and butterflies he had made himself, Karim said, “I go to work” — washing dishes in a restaurant — “and I’m laughing.” He had, unexpectedly and perhaps even unjustly, won the refugee lottery. Yet even the triage was something of a sham, for few of the rejected actually went home. Karim’s old friends were still living at the Days Inn (or at least they were when, he said, he cut off contact with them a few months ago). One of them had gone home and gotten killed, and after that there was no further talk among them of return. Regardless, even if they did want to return, the decision would not be entirely theirs. The embassies of Germany’s 250,000 rejected asylum-seekers are supposed to issue documents that would allow them to return home. But since Morocco, to take one prominent example, doesn’t want its migrants back, and they themselves don’t want to return, the documents very rarely materialize. The rejected, in any case, can find alternative means of legal protection in Germany. On my first trip to Dresden I had attended a language class full of Afghans, one of whom, Habibullah Muradi, spoke some English. As a Hazara, and thus a Shiite, Muradi was subject to persecution from rival groups in his home near Baghlan and in grave danger from the Taliban, which were now, he said, 10 or so miles from his family home. When I found Muradi earlier this month, he told me that the translator at his asylum interview had given him a “90 to 95 percent” chance of being accepted. I would have said the same. But he had been rejected. Nevertheless, this shy and delicate 21-year-old who had been dispatched by his parents from an Afghan village was now enrolled in a job-training program alongside German men and women. Muradi was smart; he had graduated from high school in Afghanistan and taught himself English. In Dresden he was one of only two of the 19 students in his class who had passed the very basic German language exam. Despite the rejection of his asylum application, this had somehow made him eligible to join a company that cleaned office buildings and to be enrolled in a three-year apprenticeship, followed by two years of work. Germany offers apprenticeships in almost everything, but not, at least until recently, cleaning. Kristian Garthus-Niegel, a social anthropologist who works at the Saxony Refugee Council, a private organization that helps refugees, explained that cleaning firms had apparently figured out that they could get subsidized labor if they created vocational programs and offered them to refugees. Muradi was looking forward to learning about the chemical properties of cleaning agents. He was earning only 620 euros — less than $750 — a month, but it was a major improvement on life in Baghlan. The vast population of rejected-but-not-deported immigrants, few of them with Muradi’s academic skills, could well form an urban underclass with neither jobs nor state support. Nevertheless, the reason why it is imaginable, if just barely, that Germany will succeed in the daunting task of integration is that the entire economy is organized as a conveyer belt toward employment. The refugees constitute a kind of stress test of that system. According to figures compiled by the Jobs Center, the social service agency that has been assigned to work with refugees, about 40 percent of adult refugees in Dresden have a ninth-grade education or less. And as Jan Pratzka, head of the Jobs Center in Dresden, pointed out to me, the ninth grade in Eritrea might equal the fourth grade in Germany. What’s more, the refugees arrive without a word of German. Pratzka estimates that the minimal threshold for enrolling in the kind of vocational program that leads to a decent job is a ninth- or tenth-grade education as well as conversational proficiency in German. Otherwise, he said, “you can work in a hotel or a restaurant.” One of the open questions about the German economy is just how many unskilled jobs there are in the service sector. Pratzka said that, based on past experience with immigrants, he thinks no more than half will be working after five years. That may be generous: Two years after arriving, only 9 percent of refugees have full-time jobs. That sounds like a failure, but a country that spent hundreds of billions of dollars absorbing East Germany may not blink at the welfare costs of the refugees. I was always amazed to hear refugees talk about the Jobs Center, which seemed to offer everything and ask very little. My Arabic translator, Wissam al-Fakher, a Syrian who had himself wrangled university admission and thus had not even needed refugee status, told me that the refugees he worked with liked to say, “The Jobs Center is better than my mom.” I went there one day when Fakher was helping his friend Fatteh, a barber from Damascus. Fatteh had been summoned to the Jobs Center because he had missed a few language classes. He was complaining bitterly that he, a debonair 36-year-old who wore a fine scarf at his throat and had been cutting hair for years, was being obliged to attend not only language class but also barber class before being permitted to practice his trade. It was an insult to his professionalism. But the really remarkable thing was that when Fatteh sat down with his counselor, she didn’t want to threaten him for missing class. She was worried. Was everything okay? Could she help? Perhaps the most amazing thing of all, as al-Fakher observed, was that the Jobs Center had known that Fatteh had skipped a few language classes. It really was the German mother. The Jobs Center serves as the routing network for a system that regards not working as a temporary and remediable phase of working. In every German city, the municipal Jobs Center is paired with the Federal Employment Agency, which ministers to the recently jobless. The long-term unemployed are referred to the Jobs Center, where they continue to receive benefits in exchange for seeking work or training. Pratzka told me that 80 percent of the people who come to the Jobs Center are German, 10 percent are from other European countries, and 10 percent are refugees. The refugees are thus treated as Germans with no prior work history. They get the same benefits as Germans — 400 euros a month for an individual, plus rental. They, too, sign a contract promising to do this and that in exchange for those benefits. But the path they promise to follow is much slower. The Jobs Center urges refugees to continue language classes, even at the expense of work, until they reach proficiency, with the definition of proficiency depending on the kind of job being sought. Refugees like Karim who go straight to a job without learning German will be stuck washing dishes forever. This is not as big of a problem as refugees who are content to drift along in a state of dependency, though it is one that very much worries Pratzka. Next year, he says, when the average refugee should be further along in language class, the contracts will demand part-time work and part-time class from all beneficiaries. Until now, it has been almost impossible to fall afoul of the system; only 3 percent of refugees have seen their benefits cut for noncompliance. That number, Pratzka says, is bound to rise.

Abdulhadi Barnjakji, a refugee from Damascus, Syria, solders pieces of scrap metal as he attends a workshop at Biotec, a local association that provides activities for refugees and socially disadvantaged locals just outside of Dresden on September 29, 2016. (JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images)

My acid test for Germany’s welfare-to-work system was the Malak family, whom I met my first time in Dresden and interviewed again earlier this month. Jamail al-Malak and his wife Mirvet fled Aleppo with their daughter and two sons in 2012 when their home was flattened by a missile — fired by which side, they never knew. After bouncing from one friend or relative to another, they left for Turkey. Years of labor at his metal shop, as well as the ordeal of fleeing, had so damaged Jamail’s back that he could no longer work. He was tormented by the fact that the boys, Mustapha and Muhammad, then 17 and 16, had had to support the family with manual labor — “7 in the morning until 11 at night,” he said. In August 2015, the Malaks joined the great westward trek of refugees, arriving in Dresden on Sept. 1.

By the time we met, they had been placed in a tidy apartment in the city’s Soviet-era housing blocks. Jamail, at 46, seemed utterly played out. His eyes were outlined with gray rings, his jowls hung slackly. He recounted even the most terrible parts of his ordeal in a low, flat tone. Jamail had no thought of his own future. “I have this place,” he said to me. “That’s enough. It’s just my family I care about.” Muhammad, who spoke in monosyllables, seemed as listless as his father. He and Mustapha had dropped out of school to help their father in seventh and sixth grades. Muhammad dreamed of working in a sweets shop, but that would be impossible until he learned German. Only bright-eyed Fatin, in fifth grade with no memories of Syria and already speaking German, seemed to offer hope for the Malaks’ future.

This time around, the Malaks were very hard to track down. They had moved, and Jamail didn’t return phone calls and text messages from Fakher. I worried that something terrible had happened. We finally found his new address, but when we buzzed, he said that he couldn’t have us in — he and Mirvet had been sick. Finally, though, he popped his head out the window and told us to come up. They really had been sick — he with high blood pressure and Mirvet with crippling migraines that had kept her in a hospital for two weeks — but Jamail was also embarrassed. He had not climbed the integration ladder. He had spent only four days in language class, and Mirvet had to drop out after a few months. Jamail said that his doctor had told him to take regular walks, but his back hurt too much. He wanted nothing to do with Syrian politics — he didn’t care who won the war, so long as he could go back home — so he avoided the Aleppans in town and refused even to go to the mosque. In short, he never did anything or went anywhere. He was plainly depressed. He asked me to tell him the news about Syria, and then waved me off. “This pains my heart too much. Let’s talk about something else.”

Mirvet told me that her family had been sufficiently well known in the opposition that when the shabiha — President Bashar al-Assad’s thuggish militia — had taken the eastern, rebel-held side of Aleppo, they had dynamited the family’s abandoned homes. She did not share her husband’s dreams of return. Neither, however, did she have any sense of her own future. Since Jamail tended to answer every question I put to Mirvet, I waited until he walked out of the room to ask if she planned to look for work. She giggled. “In Syria,” she said, “it’s not normal for us women to work. I know in Germany it’s normal, but I can’t imagine doing that myself.” Jamail was old enough that he was exempt from the work requirement; he would be supported by the state for the rest of his life. Mirvet would be required to work. She had signed a contract with the Jobs Center, but the German document, which Jamail brought out for Fakher to interpret for him, only required that she show up every six months to report on her progress.

The family’s future — and thus the drama of integration — lay with the children. Fakher and I returned that evening to see them. Fatin, dark-haired, dark-eyed, smiling, restless, said that the German girls in sixth grade were mean to her. One girl had stolen her cellphone. But the family had a guardian angel, a German volunteer who often visited with her own children and helped Fatin with homework. She had gone to the school and settled the affair. In fact, the Malaks had three guardian angels. An Arab-speaking social worker at the Saxony Refugee Council had worked with them until moving to a new job and had in turn introduced them to both this German lady and another, who had helped Mustapha find an apartment in a very nice neighborhood when the Jobs Center had insisted that, at 21, he needed a place of his own. (The Jobs Center paid, of course.)

Refugees in Dresden all seem to have such teams of volunteer ladies at their disposal. Church attendance has dropped sharply in eastern Germany, but the diminishing band of the faithful seem deeply invested in social activism. I would see them, middle-aged ladies in graying ponytails, sitting with refugees at the impromptu cafes in town, poring over official documents. They often brought homemade cake and bread. The volunteer army vastly outnumbered the right-wing cranks who turned out to protest the newcomers. It was one of the reasons the refugees had a shot at success.

Muhammad, alas, seemed as lumpish as he had the year before. He and Mustapha had both failed their German exam at the basic, B1 level. Both continued to receive their subsidies from the Jobs Center, which had assigned them to plant flowers by the roadside in exchange for tram fare — about as low as you could go without falling off integration’s transmission belt altogether. Muhammad complained that even his friends who had passed B1 couldn’t get a job; there was nothing to be had. The truth was that basic German was still too basic: decent jobs required more language proficiency. The Jobs Center wanted the boys to go back to school. But the idea of human capital was alien to the Malaks. Jamail, who was ashamed of his family’s dependence on the Jobs Center, was urging the boys to get any job they could. Mustapha, who was at least more talkative than Muhammad, had actually snagged a two-week internship at a metalworking shop. Afterward, the boss had said he would call if something opened up; he hadn’t yet.

Muhammad and Mustapha seemed destined for a life of washing dishes — at best. They would drift to the margins of German life. Yet something happened that gave me a tiny glimmer of hope. The day after I saw the Malaks, I went to Heidenau, a suburb southeast of Dresden, to visit a vocational education program, the very heart of the German employment system. The program was operated by a private firm that offered classroom education to employees of the small machine shops that dot Saxony. The owner, Norbert Rokasky, had decided that he wanted to extend his program to include refugees. When he discovered that very few refugees had the language skills to take classes in German, he hired another firm to offer language classes. When the students had reached B2, he would help them find jobs and then offer vocational training. Even now he let the students go to one of workshops on the campus and bang metal, just to get the feel of the thing. The average refugee, he told me, was less qualified but more motivated and hardworking than his German students. I mentioned Mustapha. Would he be qualified to enroll? Of course, Rokasky said, the firm that offered the internship should have sent Mustapha to him. He gave me his card and said that he would expect a call. Refugees might slide between the cracks, but Germany was trying hard to catch them.

It’s an extraordinary system that enfolds refugees in Germany — one part voluntarism, two parts private sector, and everything else, the benevolent welfare state. Such a system raises a question about liberalism. The United States has a liberal economy in the classical sense of minimal state intervention. The American system creates an abundance of low-level and informal job opportunities. It does not, however, have a means of systematically equipping the ill equipped for the job market. Germany has had an armor-plated labor market with social protections since the time of Bismarck, and very little informal economy. Yet the massive system of benefits, and the structured conveyor belt to employment, seems to allow it to contain the social problems associated with the mass arrival of refugees — problems that would swamp a free-market economy. And by containing the social problem, Germany has been able to contain the political problem. Put otherwise, Germany’s illiberal economy has served as a foundation for liberal politics. One could argue that the situation in the United States is the exact opposite.