It was a bold call that reverberated around the world five years ago this week. “Wir schaffen das,” claimed German Chancellor Angela Merkel, shortly after visiting a refugee center near Dresden. “We can do it.”

The number of asylum seekers and other migrants coming to Germany was beginning to ascend, and Merkel would soon open the doors to as many as 1.2 million of them, many from Syria, over 2015 and 2016. As a political matter, the phrase began to haunt Merkel. Critics including the far-right Alternative for Germany threw it back in her face. They blamed the welcoming policy for encouraging large numbers of arrivals and tied it to violence and criminal acts blamed on recently arrived migrants and asylees, including sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve in Cologne and other cities, and, in 2016, a suicide bombing at a music festival in Ansbach carried out by a failed asylum seeker.

Five years later, did Germany “do it?”

Merkel seems to think so. She “would make essentially the same decisions” if she were asked to repeat the period again, she said at a press conference last week. More and more migrants have found work in Germany; still, only half of those who have arrived since 2013 have full-time paying jobs, according to a study released earlier this year. Among German residents, 51 percent rejected Merkel’s asylum policy in a new survey, compared to less than one-third who supported it. Tellingly, the proportion of respondents who once supported the policy but have changed their mind was more than three times as large as those who once rejected it but now support.

The story has been different—but no less complicated—elsewhere in the world. Last week marked three years since Myanmar’s security forces launched a violent crackdown on the Rohingya people in the country’s western Rakhine state, sending more than 650,000 into neighboring Bangladesh. Many moved into crowded camps and informal settlements in Bangladesh’s southern Cox’s Bazar district, where other Rohingya had been living for years. Combined with earlier-arrived migrants, there are now approximately 1 million Rohingya in the country.

Bangladesh has had no interest in taking a cue from Germany. The Rohingya are “a threat to security,” Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said last year. She has pushed to have them repatriate, despite earlier failed attempts and efforts by Myanmar to make return more difficult. The government has limited assistance available to migrants and conditions in the camps have deteriorated.

There are obvious and major differences between the two countries. Despite being led by women who have been in office for at least a decade, Germany and Bangladesh took sharply different approaches when confronted with major upticks in arrivals of people fleeing conflict. Managing these arrivals looks different in different settings, but these two cases offer a display in miniature of the differing paths that countries have taken. Whether or not they can “do it” depends on what they intend to do.

Best regards,
Julian Hattem
Editor, Migration Information Source
[email protected]