In Chapter 3, I applied ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2016 to 2019 to frame the experience within the integration regime through the perspective of young men who arrived in Germany mostly alone. In this chapter, I will highlight the experience of several families that I collaborated with during the same fieldwork period. Their experience with integration mechanisms was markedly different from that of young men – for both obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. What emerges from this are structural issues that further question the unitary concept of goal-oriented integration.

Villages and small towns

The following sections are primarily concerned with collaborators who live in small villages next to Osnabruck and Hameln. Rasha and her family settled in a village called Westerkappeln, located 14 kilometres west of Osnabruck, and Abdul and Adel are now living 9 kilometres south of Hameln in an area called Gross-Berkel, which is an unincorporated part of Aerzen. Unlike the cities in which I conducted the rest of the fieldwork in this book, these small villages are characterized by much fewer resources. There is no office for integration that drives the local integration ideology or any specialized office for refugees inside the local bureaucracies of the BA or Job Centres, and no Ausländerbehörde. These are Kommunen (or Gemeinde) which are part of a district (Kreis), which means it is at the district level that the aforementioned bureaucratic functions operate. However, aside from the structural differences, several distinctions emerge from their experience as a family as opposed to the experience of young men in Chapter 3.

“They don't want to give refugees houses”

The issue of secure housing is a topic that has emerged several times in this book, yet under different circumstances, because it is the most basic condition of settling in a new country. However, I emphasize the time refugees spent in what should be temporary emergency housing even after being granted asylum, which is largely based on regional policy, local housing costs and support networks. This goes beyond the basic categories of city, small town and rural, and considers the entire social environment (soziales milieu). The type of housing available for refugees is distinguished between families from young men, as well as the means by which that housing is accessed, yet the search and security of housing in both cases often strengthens previously formed relationships.