Di-Angelo’s words provide a white context to Eddo-Lodge’s book Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race. Specifically the racialised context to the disconnection that can follow cross-racial exchanges. As a woman writer racialised as black, Eddo-Lodge refers to ‘the gulf of an emotional disconnect’ which translates to recognisable difficulties in being seen, heard and understood. She names what people racialised as black often experience when they attempt to articulate matters related to race. In the previous chapter, we proposed that whiteness may be reiterated through unprocessed traumatic responses, responses which might continue to be transmitted from generation to generation. In Chapter 4 we have seen that lynching was used as a method of social and economic control. We referenced the grotesque pictures of lynching scenes on postcards which depicted jovial and carefree white audiences posing next to black bodies, often hanging, in pieces, from trees. Reconciling the joyful mood of these audiences with the gruesome violent acts committed may seem impossible, even after the examination of sadism. Dissociation and splitting offer analytic tools to help do just that.

Splitting and dissociation

The defences of splitting and dissociation which keep white ignorance and white benevolence intact in fact strengthen the case for white trauma. But since maintaining the status quo requires some disconnection from the status quo, the distance created by splitting and dissociation illuminates the temporality of whiteness and its links with dominant ideologies and epistemic practices in the West.

A cultural note

In May 2020, the world was shaken to its core when the videoed killing of George Floyd by white police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis took place. This act of extraordinary yet banalised police brutality resulted in possibly the largest wave of global protests and riots in living memory. For several months, and across the world, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in anger, despair and distress, dissenting at what seems like unrelenting police violence against black bodies. In the US, largely peaceful but resolute protests were met with largely violent repression. Scenes of protesters being roughly handled, aggressively apprehended, hit with batons, tear gas or rubber bullets by a heavily armed and militarised police force were repeatedly spread across our screens. Via national news, on our social media timelines, and for many of us in our dreams too. In the midst of the chaos, I tried as much as I could to spare my mind from witnessing the events too closely. I avoided the video like the plague. It took me several months before I found it in me to watch the infamous recording. But for the need to write the present chapter, I do not believe that I would have had any inclination to do so. Like many, across the globe, the mere written description of the events leading to Floyd’s death, the incessant news reporting, were tortuous enough. They were triggering enough. The word trigger has unnecessarily become controversial, in large part because of right-wing media pundits who have, over the years, perverted its original meaning and taken it as symptom of what they describe as a manifestation of ‘snowflake’ culture allegedly infringing on the capacity to speak freely. But understanding psychological triggers is important to understanding the effect of whiteness on all of us. We speak of triggers when we are dealing with trauma.

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.

While Chapter 1 addressed the social imaginaries that were at play during the long summer of migration in 2015, this chapter will reframe some of those events to spotlight the power imbalance between refugees and the local administrative state. In a very unique dynamic, the construction of social realities on both the side of Syrian refugees and the side of German residents, as well as the bureaucratic state, dictated the way in which relationships between the two would develop over the following years. This chapter focuses less on the individual narratives and more on public narratives about refugees. It will look at how public narratives influenced both policy and its implementation. More specifically, it frames key events that shifted the public imaginary and produced a reaction from the refugees, insofar as their subjectification as ‘the refugee’ led them to lose control of their own narratives. Chapter 1 moved quickly through the processes of asylum and the role of the local administration. This chapter will return to some of those periods to show how the bureaucratic formulations of policy and the arbitrary implementation of integration policy were seen at the local level, defying the portrayal of a unitary national integration process.

By reframing the events in terms of both shifting public discourse and power, I will draw on the large body of literature on waiting to describe the particular case of Syrians in Germany using what I call orientation stasis. This orientation stasis occurs in times of insecurity and inability to rely on previously learned (and embodied) behaviours – or, to use Bourdieu's concept, their habitus becomes something that disorients them rather than guides them. This chapter builds on previous theoretical work from Jackson (2005), who applies Bourdieu's concepts of illusio (feel for the game) to the situation of refugees arriving in new and unknown circumstances.

Refugees arriving in 2015 began to question the stability of their everyday ability to successfully navigate regimes of asylum and apply accumulated capital, which was compounded by the desire to continue (existentially) moving forward. This drove refugees to attempt to move, but the outcomes were often undesirable, so they remain existentially immobile – in other words, in stasis.

Transnational refugee research in crisis

This was not the image I knew of refugees of a civil war. Refugees of a war brutally fought over the last four years living in Turkey should be living in camps, receiving some kind of aid from internationally organized bodies like the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) or the International Red Cross (IRC). This was my naïve thought when I arrived in Reyhanli in 2015.

Unlike the bustling tourist cities and modern metropolises, Reyhanli resembled a dusty backwater, a city expanding for all the wrong reasons. The city had gone from a small town of tens of thousands with a Turkish majority before 2011 to a bustling city with apartments being constructed at an exponential rate and a growing Syrian majority population by the time I arrived there. This was the summer of 2015 and Turkey was hosting over a million Syrian refugees. Like those in Reyhanli, the vast majority lived in urban centres and could only survive in Turkey earning income through backbreaking labour or savings they brought with them from Syria. Meanwhile, on the borders of Europe, a ‘crisis’ was being forged both internally and externally.

I had spent the summer working on a farm in southern Italy while writing my master's thesis and wanted to go over land to Turkey, where I would meet four other student colleagues from the university. There, we conducted a workshop during August to teach refugees of the Syrian conflict photojournalism and documentary filmmaking with an emphasis on peace building. In July, I took the ferry from Bari to Albania and spent a few weeks travelling up the idyllic Adriatic coast. The atmosphere across the Adriatic region was relaxed, with little public acknowledgement or discourse about the rising daily count of refugee deaths in the eastern Mediterranean. The deaths of migrants were nothing new in recent history (UNHCR 2019).

I realized that I would not have the time needed to go by land the rest of the way as planned, so I took a flight from Tirana to Istanbul. At Istanbul Airport I was stopped by the plain-clothes Turkish security forces, who asked where I would be travelling to. In ignorance I replied that I would be travelling to Hatay.

Integrating integration: a prelude

A majority of young men in Germany

In the period from 2013 to 2016 there were a variety of media discourses highlighting the number of young male refugees who arrived in Europe. These discourses helped shape the imaginaries of refugees who became racialized and seen as criminal threats to order. The discussion was always framed by who had integrated well and who had not. This tension tended to be conceived of as social divisions emerging from the ‘refugee crisis’ and of perceived cultural differences (Richter 2016; Bangel and Thurm 2016; Bershidsky 2018; Abdelilah et al 2019). However, the fact remains that the majority of asylum applicants and refugees arriving from 2015 onwards were indeed young men living alone – a group I consider to be from aged 18 to 35 (BAMF 2019a). Nonetheless, much of the discourse was uncritically observed from a statistical perspective of male arrivals, and ignored the broader context of refugee arrivals. In the following chapters a more nuanced and less static narrative will be presented. In other words, Chapters 4 and 5 draw a rather decisive line between the group of young male arrivals and the family group arrivals.

The distribution of Syrians who arrived in Germany can be analysed across transnational class divisions, temporal arrivals and the habitus of refugees themselves. There were incredibly nuanced cases in which refugees arrived in Europe and applied for asylum, but later had family members join them, or in some cases arrived after legal changes and received a status that prohibited a family reunification visa (Familiennachzug). There were refugees from well-educated, wealthy land-owning classes who were eventually able to have their entire large family of eight settled, and others who were the only family members sent to apply for asylum because the family could only afford to send one person to Europe. In some cases, young men overcame legal challenges of status by taking informal action that led to other legal mechanisms, which in turn were more favourable to their livelihoods. Unlike attempts that have been made by researchers, politicians and journalists – and often in the public imaginary in Germany – to essentialize both society and refugees as distinct groups, it is the aim here to present a spectrum of both experience and circumstances, where many paths and routes were taken in order to navigate the German integration regime.

This chapter is primarily aimed at presenting the various outcomes of refugee interaction with the German administrative state. What impact did the integration regime have on the everyday lives of refugees? What did the refugees in the best possible position to ‘integrate’ achieve in terms of being accepted into German society, having met the official goals of integration? Among these questions, this chapter serves as the conclusion to the final part is what I consider the integration regime. After navigating arrival, language learning, private housing and relationship building, refugees should be in a position to find work and consider settling in. The integration regime promised, among other things, a livelihood through language learning. Here I will examine how refugees were rewarded for following the legal and symbolic frameworks of integration.

Ephemeral integration

In the previous chapters, the state and policy were discussed in terms of local administration, deploying Gupta's ‘blurred boundaries’ approach that pushes back against the reification of the state by arguing that the government often enacts policy to reaffirm the interests of ‘powerful minorities’ and that the actual state only exists in the ‘social imaginary’ (Gupta 2012, 56). However, Sökefeld adds another layer to the discourse, differentiating ‘the state’ and ‘government’, and noting that ‘the state-idea is closely linked to the idea of the nation which on such occasions is celebrated through its symbols and heroes’ (Sökefeld 2016, 10). In doing so, he presents an important distinction that questions the universal understanding of how the state may be interpreted. He frames ‘the state-idea as a container’ with particular importance to the analysis of Gilgit-Baltistan, while at the same time concluding that ‘the walls and borders of the container are often negotiated and made penetrable by the state-system’ and that ‘the container system is very leaky’ (Sökefeld 2016, 13). Similarly, both anthropologists (Ong 2006) and geographers (Darling 2017) have reinforced notions of the scale and space of citizenship; that is, they attempt to free citizenship research from attachment to the state. However, Tuckett argues that ‘cultural citizenship’ actually ‘reinstates the legal-political aspects’ of citizenship, which means it is from encounters with the state and institutions that refugees form their ‘culturally specific modes of behavior’ (Tuckett 2018, 74).

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.

Here and there

The ‘integration’ of foreigners has become a centrepiece for migration policy in many European countries and is seen as exceptional to modern Europe in comparison to immigration policies within the global north both historically and legally. While the othering of outsiders can be found throughout history, the historical exlusion of foreigners was usually an outright call for dehumanizing dominion over other groups and a complaint that those who were given equal rights would discretely pervert the mythical greatness of a homeland. Integration is built on the assumption that foreigners are intrinsically different and require mechanisms to thrive within a paradoxically homogeneous society.

Similar to Chakrabarty's (2007) notion of the magical histories and subject making of Europe, recent history shows that integration-oriented policy is the best way to support migrant populations. Scholars will return to the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees who gained asylum in Germany and consider how well they have integrated since arriving. Who is employed? How are they employed? Do they speak German well? What about the second generation born after they received asylum?

Few will ask questions regarding their ability to adapt to shifting bureaucratic expectations or how family dynamics changed over time as they gained rights or remained without certain ones. This book has attempted to avoid the gaze towards questions framed in terms of whether or not I believe there is a holistic society one can integrate into, as Schinkel frames discourse on integration (Schinkel 2017, 3). Instead, I have tried to unpack the social phenomena that works as a feedback loop for integration policy and what happened once hundreds of thousands of refugees were introduced into this feedback loop. In doing so, I engage with Schinkel's analysis of ‘the phenomenon of society observing itself in terms of such integration’ (Schinkel 2017, 5). Schinkel calls it the ‘imagined society’, but similar arguments have been made by Glick Schiller and Salazar, by way of the concept of ‘national mythscapes’ (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013), and by Chakrabarty, by way of the continued exploration of Europe as subject (Spivak 1994; Chakrabarty 2007) – the latter two of the three approaches capture the more dynamic feel of the integration regime I explore here.

Inside the regime

In Parts I and II of this book I narrated the arrival, asylum application and early experiences with the integration regime from the perspective of refugees. In Part III, I shift focus to two areas: first, how intuitions were operating during this period, the challenges they faced and the way in which they incorporated themes of the integration regime; and, second, how this institutionalization of the integration regime impacted Syrians attempting to permanently settle in Germany. This chapter takes many of the themes featured in previous chapters and applies them to ethnographic work conducted within several federal and local government intuitions. Chapter 6 will outline many of the structural challenges ‘well-integrated’ refugees face, as well as challenges for refugees who are outside the scope of mechanisms created by the integration regime.

When I began undertaking my fieldwork, meeting up with the contacts I first met in Turkey in 2015 and then in 2017 travelling around Germany in order to reconnect with them, the bureaucratic theme almost immediately emerged. I was just beginning my inquiries, so it was unclear at the time why BA played such a vital role the experience of Syrians in Germany. Once this finding was made, I sought to join research collaborators on their visits to in the Job Centre in order to gain insights into the bureaucratic processes and observe the tensions that my contacts recounted to me. Early on, I was faced with difficulties contacting the Job Centre in Saarbrucken and near Westerkappeln (administered by the district of Steinfurt), and was later denied access to BAMF's central office in Nuremberg. However, a colleague referred me to someone close to him at a Job Centre in the city of Kassel and they agreed to let me observe and conduct interviews. I was also, after much effort, able to access the Job Centre, BA and the local Foreigner's Office in Munich. The offices of various bureaucracies in Munich were particularly supportive in providing transparency to researchers like myself.

What follows is a complement to other references to these agencies given throughout this book. It attempts to frame localized variation in the legal interpretation and structure of agencies in the context of their regional resources, as well as some of the ways in which agents work with clients to achieve differing Job Centre agendas.