This chapter is primarily about arrival. However, in order to understand how and why asylum seekers arrived in Germany, it is necessary to examine the historical development of migration policy in Germany as well as the circumstances of the so-called refugee crisis. I will first outline how the public imaginary anticipated and framed the events leading up to the summer of 2015, and then I will draw from my fieldwork to show how these circumstances were perceived by refugees arriving to apply for asylum.

The bureaucratic hurdles of staying

The imaginary is a particular kind of existential world building before and during migratory paths. The desire to move – and in the case of displaced peoples, the necessity to move – comes with an existential feeling of needing to go somewhere during this trajectory of migration. As this imagined trajectory builds through waiting times, conflict, uncertainty and small successes, imaginaries of both a future with new life between space and place emerge. By 2015, many of the interlocutors in my ethnographic fieldwork had already solidified a strong image of life in Germany through existing ties to the country or images in the news media. This chapter explores how these imaginaries of order and democracy before leaving for Europe influenced the reaction to the chaos and disorder of arriving in Germany during a time of crisis. These early interactions with German residents and the bureaucratic state would have lasting implications on the choices they would later make navigating the integration regime. The chapter will also frame this experience from the perspective of the refugees themselves and show how migration and refugee research can apply the entirety of the often circular and ongoing aspect of moving across national boundaries to create a holistic analysis a migration experience.

First, what may be considered ‘settled’ in one line of thought in migration research is continually unaccounted for in others. The very nature of migration studies or refugee studies is framed in location and movement, which creates an embedded tension between the tendency to study a single site and the challenge of considering several areas as one unified experience. In other words, does the empirical work centre around experience or geographies and conditionalities? Second, if, as I attempt to argue in the following discussion, research can be grounded in both experience and locality, then the pursuit of this unification requires a situation-specific applied framework.