“8. Precarious Inclusion Refugees in Higher Education in Germany” in “Resisting the Dehumanization of Refugees”
Chapter 8 Precarious Inclusion Refugees in Higher Education in Germany
Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez
In September 2020, a petition calling for the immediate evacuation of Moria revealed the disastrous and inhumane conditions of the refugee camps on the Greek island of Lesbos.1 Designed for 2,500 inhabitants, the camp housed approximately 13,000 women, men, and children. It was set on fire—most likely by right-wing extremists—on the night of September 8, 2020, forcing 13,000 refugees waiting for their asylum applications to be processed to sleep on the streets. Families, children, and elderly people found themselves in a desperate situation: they were often subjected to racist attacks but were prevented by the police from going to the hospital in Mytilene. In response to this dire situation, a request was made to the European Union (EU) to provide immediate humanitarian assistance. During the first weeks of September 2020, the EU debated the possibility of offering shelter to unaccompanied minors. On September 11, 2020, the German internal affairs minister announced that four hundred unaccompanied children would be relocated to the Greek mainland.2 As an EU member state, Germany called on other EU countries to participate in a rescue action that would provide shelter for refugees in Moira. Most of the states either hesitated or refused outright to take in refugees. Countries such as Hungary and Poland, but also Austria and Sweden, openly expressed their unwillingness to shelter refugees in crisis conditions, while countries like Spain, Italy, and Greece drew attention to the numerous refugee camps they already provide and their role as European border guards, preventing refugees from venturing any further into EU territory (Hess and Petrogiannis 2020). The German government reacted to this crisis by agreeing to receive 1,500 refugees from Greece.
Asylum and migration policies within the EU are marked by political conjunctures: the rise of extreme right-wing political forces and the COVID-19 pandemic have accelerated and accentuated the restrictive nature of these policies. It is against this backdrop that the discussion about the access of persons seeking asylum in Germany is set. The prevention of access to education for refugees applying for asylum is a symptom of the inhumane character of this process. This chapter engages with the project Branch Out: Initial Support for Transcultural Learning, which took place at Justus-Liebig-University (JLU) in Giessen between 2016 and 2018 and attempted to create spaces of access to post-secondary education where none existed before. However, the structural ability of this project to dismantle the barriers to post-secondary education for refugees has been very limited. In this chapter, I discuss the paradox of attempting to provide a certain degree of access to university while being confronted with unyielding barriers to post-secondary education for refugees. The discussion of the project Branch Out that follows illustrates the inhumane living conditions of persons seeking asylum in Germany while offering immediate provisional suggestions on how to deal with this problem. The lack of institutional support for projects like this one, as our discussion will also show, demonstrates the need for universities to create access to post-secondary education for those seeking asylum—and for refugees as a whole. I will first embed this question within the analytical framework of the asylum-migration nexus by engaging with EU asylum policies. I will then discuss access to post-secondary education for students seeking asylum by focusing on Germany, in particular on the Branch Out project. Within this context of asylum seeking, I will look at the potential and limits of transcultural learning. Finally, I will end with some observations and concluding remarks about how to build an anti-racist intersectional university.
Coloniality of Migration, Asylum, and Access to HEIs
Research on access to post-secondary education for refugees conducted in the last few decades highlights the dynamics of exclusion and inclusion in universities (see Dryden-Peterson and Giles 2012). Khalid Arar, Yasar Kondakci, and Bernhard Streitwieser (2020) note that studies on displaced people, particularly refugees, have been neglected by research on international student migration. The inclusion of displaced people, undocumented migrants, and refugees in post-secondary education requires further research to provide a better understanding of the relationship between asylum and migration policies and inclusion in higher education institutions. Existing research draws attention to questions of social justice by emphasizing education as a human right (Smith 2004). However, Sarah Dryden-Peterson and Wenona Giles (2012, 3) observe that education “is not often included in humanitarian responses” to refugees’ needs. The 1951 Refugee Convention “recognizes the fundamental rights of refugees to access education, earn a livelihood, and seek justice when wronged” (ibid.). Free access to primary education is guaranteed to children, but access to post-secondary education is seldom mentioned in relation to the educational inclusion of refugees in Europe. Notably, the United Nations’ (1989) Convention on the Rights of the Child emphasizes that this right should also include access to post-secondary education. As Dryden-Peterson and Giles (2012) argue, post-secondary education for refugees is a sustainable resource for society as a whole and a stepping stone for the development of universal quality education. This claim is particularly important when we consider migration policies as framed within what I call the coloniality of migration (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018, 2023). Migration control and management policies, seen from the perspective of the coloniality of power (Quijano 2000), exert mechanisms of colonial differentiation inserted in classification systems that produce and mark social hierarchies. Embedded in a human/non-human dichotomy, migration policies lead to the creation of societal positionalities framed by processes of dehumanization. This is particularly true when it comes to the negation of basic human and citizenship rights such as access to secondary and post-secondary education. My discussion of the situation of refugees in German higher education institutions (HEIs) in this chapter addresses these inhumane conditions while also following local and timely attempts at minor destabilization or collective strategies that challenge this situation—namely, the pilot project Branch Out: Initial Support for Transcultural Learning in HEIs.
Research on access to post-secondary education for refugees in the EU has primarily been conducted in the United Kingdom (Stevenson and Willott 2007), followed by Germany (cf. Blumenthal et al. 2017; Lambert, Blumenthal, and Beigang 2018) and Austria (Atanasoska and Proyer 2018). Between 2015 and 2017, German society experienced “the long summer of migration” (Kasparek and Speer 2015). This term describes the developments following the September 2015 march of thousands of refugees from the Keleti railway station in Budapest toward Austria, Germany, and other parts of western Europe. During this time, diverse social actors reacted positively to this movement by supporting the arrival of refugees locally. There were numerous initiatives in neighbourhoods, villages, towns, and cities to welcome refugees and promote their inclusion. Promoted by the regional state of Hesse and JLU in Giessen, the project Branch Out: Initial Support for Transcultural Learning was founded at the university. Drawing upon this experience, this chapter reflects upon the potentiality and limitations of current programs on refugees’ access to post-secondary education.
From Exile to Refugees: The Asylum-Migration Nexus
After World War II, most countries in Europe committed to the individual right to asylum for those fleeing war, political persecution, and authoritarianism. Until 1993, this individual right to asylum was the legal basis for acquiring political refuge. After the unification of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in 1989, German nationalism re-emerged, and racial myths about the so-called German Volk reappeared; both manifested on the street as racist attacks against refugees and migrants. Media and political debates played an important role in this political conjuncture: racist images of “overburdening refugee boats” heading toward Europe were disseminated by newspapers and television news. Refugees were constructed in the media not as needing shelter but as “invaders.” Those seeking asylum in Europe, particularly in Germany, were suspected of making bogus asylum claims. Thus, the human right to asylum was turned into a state regulatory device, subjected to political conjunctures, no longer based on individual entitlement to sanctuary or shelter for persons fleeing violence and persecution. Since the change of the asylum law in Germany in 1993, the individual right to asylum has been restricted. Asylum claims are decided on the basis that the countries are considered by the German state as “unsafe” or “safe” countries in regard to human rights infringements. Currently, persons fleeing war or political, religious, gendered, or sexual persecution are able to apply for asylum, with the outcome dependent on the specific facts of their case within their countries’ capacity of state protection. Asylum laws, however, are constantly modified and tightened, and the state’s goal is to process asylum applications as quickly as possible. The number of deportations of people whose petitions for asylum have been rejected is steadily increasing (Pro Asyl 2021).
In 2020, the EU enforced migration containment through the implementation of the New Pact of Asylum and Migration (NPAM).3 This pact’s neoliberal rhetoric introduces terms such as responsibility, solidarity, talent, and resilience, appealing to a discourse of protection of refugees and balanced, fair decision-making. According to the European Commission (2020),
Migration is a complex issue, with many facets that need to be weighed together. The safety of people who seek international protection or a better life, the concerns of countries at the EU’s external borders, which worry that migratory pressures will exceed their capacities and which need solidarity from others. Or the concerns of other EU Member States, which are concerned that, if procedures are not respected at the external borders, their own national systems for asylum, integration or return will not be able to cope in the event of large flows. Based on a holistic assessment, the Commission is proposing a fresh start on migration: building confidence through more effective procedures and striking a new balance between responsibility and solidarity.
While this rhetoric seems to guarantee the well-being of refugees, we would be mistaken in this assumption. The “new balance between responsibility and solidarity” addresses the need for cooperation among EU member states for implementing measures and policies on the national level to foster the control of the union’s external borders, coordinating asylum application proceedings, and fostering effective policies of deportation throughout the EU. The use of the term solidarity is contemptuous and self-serving—its goal is to monitor the entry of refugees to EU territory based on national labour market demands and economic interests. In other words, what is meant here is solidarity among EU countries rather than global solidarity and responsibility. The costs should be evenly shared across EU member states. Words like flexibility and resilience allude to the implementation of measures to monitor and regulate migration into the EU in times of so-called crisis. The respective measures are subsumed under the labels of “preparedness and crisis blueprint” and “effective crisis response”—in the latter, “solidarity mechanisms” outline “relocation and return sponsorships.” EU member states are asked to equitably participate in the “relocation” or distribution of refugees among individual countries or to help with what is euphemistically called the “responsibility of returning”—that is, the deportation of those with no legal residence in any member state. For countries opposed to hosting refugees, like Hungary or Poland, this “fair share of responsibilities” would mean “sponsoring” the deportation of refugees in Greece or Italy. Creating an effective and speedy decision-making process as well as an acceleration of deportation measures, the cooperation among the EU member states contributes to fostering the control of Schengen and the EU’s external borders. After several political debates and submission to extreme right-wing and conservative forces within the EU, the New Pact on Migration and Asylum was agreed upon by the European Parliament and the Council in December 2023. The agreement addresses five main areas of regulation within the EU:
- • Screening Regulation: Creating uniform rules concerning the identification of non-EU nationals upon their arrival, thus increasing the security within the Schengen area.
- • Eurodac Regulation: Developing a common database gathering more accurate and complete data to detect unauthorised movements.
- • Asylum Procedures Regulation: Making asylum, return and border procedures quicker and more effective.
- • Asylum Migration Management Regulation: Establishing a new solidarity mechanism amongst Member States to balance the current system, where a few countries are responsible for the vast majority of asylum applications, and clear rules on responsibility for asylum applications.
- • Crisis and Force majeure Regulation: Ensuring that the EU is prepared in the future to face situations of crisis, including instrumentalisation of migrants. (European Commission 20234)
Since 2020, the New Pact has delivered various outcomes regarding the control of EU borders and the deportation of refugees. It established “warning and forecasting systems allowing prompt identification of migration situations” (ibid.) and a common European deportation system through the EU Return Coordination, established on March 2, 2022. Besides the control of borders and the reduction of asylum claims, the NPAM outlines the need to reform and revise migrant labour recruitment policies within the EU under the point “skills and talents.” The NPAM has defined four tasks:
- • reform of the EU Blue Card for highly skilled workers;
- • revision of the Single Permit Directives enabling low and medium-skilled workers to regularize their employment on an individual basis;
- • revision of the Long-Term-Residence Directives addressing the mobility of EU citizens within the EU; and
- • the creation of a talent pool for the recruitment of international specialized workers based on national employment demands. European Commission (20205)
Considering this new EU development, the post-secondary educational inclusion of refugees seems to be a remote endeavour. The NPAM rhetoric of integration—prominently established in EU pacts on migration and asylum in the late 1990s and the beginning of the millennium—is rather silent when it comes to HEI access for persons seeking asylum. Equally absent is the human right of asylum: the offer of shelter for people suffering displacement or persecution or escaping from war and conflict zones. What is never mentioned is Europe’s own participation in and responsibility for the creation of global inequalities.
The analysis of global migratory movements from former European-colonized territories as well as territories at the center of international political conflicts where the EU plays a significant role calls to mind Anibal Quijano’s (2000, 2008) framework of the coloniality of power, which has informed my own work on the coloniality of migration (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2016, 2018, 2023). We cannot discuss contemporary asylum and migration control rhetoric and policies without acknowledging the modern colonial entanglement from which they surface. Drawing upon Quijano’s analysis of the coloniality of power, the coloniality of migration refers to new forms of racism, producing a nomenclature of racial differentiation, categorization, and classification developed through migration and asylum policies. These policies degrade and dehumanize persons with regulations that attempt to govern their lives and attack their subjectivity. Encompassing different social sites, asylum and migration policies aim to hinder movement and impose restrictions on individual autonomy and agency. Among those sites regulated by asylum and migration policies is post-secondary education.
During the application process, asylum seekers have a limited right to work and no rights when it comes to their educational goals, besides being obliged to participate in German courses and so-called integration classes. If not granted asylum, they will be given permission to remain in the country for a specific period of time. In general, the right of asylum has become a device in migration control policies. As I argued in my article on the coloniality of migration (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018) following Stephen Castles’s (2006) paradigm of the migration-asylum nexus, the humanitarian goal of asylum policies has become connected to the labour market demands of nation-states. In the twenty-first century, asylum in the Global North has become a field of governance shaped by utilitarian nation-state approaches mediated by global economic and political conjunctural governance strategies and interests. It is necessary, then, to acknowledge the field of asylum as an entry point for the control and management of migration and to focus on the link between national asylum policies and migrant labour recruitment strategies.
The asylum-migration nexus draws attention to the global historical and contemporary economic and political entanglement (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2021) in which humanitarian migratory movements are nationally administered through devices attached to the political governance of asylum. Focusing on the governance of asylum makes us aware of its political implications: asylum is related to other fields of global governance linked to development policies, integration, and public security practices. The field of public security has especially been the subject of political attention since the turn of the century, with 9/11 inaugurating a new period in the governance of asylum and migration, shaped by the introduction of increasing control and surveillance measures linked to political threat and terrorism addressed by nation-states and regional international organizations.
The asylum-migration nexus is mediated through the political conjuncture of security practices on three levels. First, it is managed in connection to the “collateral damage” caused by global wars and political conflicts. Second, it is related to the surveillance and control of national and regional borders and the production of bordering and border control devices and rhetoric. This positioning reproduces the refugee and migrant as the racialized other of Europe, constructed in popular media and political debates as a potential threat to the nation’s social cohesion. Third, asylum and migration configure institutional semantic fields, producing a nomenclature of hierarchical differentiation and categorical classification of causes, patterns, and trajectories that serve as rationales for the refusal of asylum. These circumstances undermine the ethical obligation of states to offer asylum as a universal human right.
Asylum policies are also governed by the integration aims of nation-states. Refugee access to the labour market has been at the forefront of nation-state integration agendas. As the Socio-Economic Panel at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) demonstrated in its 2019 study IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees in Germany, 43 percent of male refugees who arrived in Germany in 2015 found employment (DIW Berlin 2022). Regarding those from Syria, although two-thirds were highly educated, they were unable to find employment commensurate with their educational qualifications. The study notes that refugee women have not experienced the same degree of inclusion into the labour market as men. Furthermore, refugees were generally paid less than their German counterparts for similar jobs. While the integration of refugees into Germany’s labour market has received attention, their inclusion within post-secondary education has been scarcely studied.
Access to Post-secondary Education for Students Seeking Asylum
In 2018, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees estimated that there were 1.5 million refugees in Germany, with more than two-thirds of them arriving in 2015. In 2019, 71,000 adults applied for asylum in Germany—12,000 of them Syrian, 7,500 Turkish, and 6,000 from Iran (Brücker et al. 2019). Half of all applicants were younger than thirty years old, 47 percent were married, and 60 percent self-defined as men. Most of the women—56 percent—came from Syria. Twenty-four percent of all applicants had obtained a university degree, 19.9 percent had secondary education, 29.8 percent had attended a middle school, and 17 percent had received primary education. The applicants with the highest educational level came from Iran, followed by Turkey (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge 2020). These figures demonstrate that a large percentage of persons in the asylum application process could be enrolled in post-secondary institutions, but how are these institutions responding to this reality?
There are at least three entry points to post-secondary educational institutions for refugees in Germany. First, on arrival, school-age refugee children are integrated into the German primary and secondary school system. Research in this area demonstrates that more than 90 percent of children who arrived since 2015 have completed a German-language proficiency course. These children accessed regular German schools, continuing to post-secondary education after receiving their Abitur. Yet, as recent research (de Paiva Lareiro 2019) on refugees in secondary education demonstrates, a large percentage of school students who entered the country as refugees attend the vocational secondary school (Hauptschule), with only a small percentage attending the intermediate secondary school (Realschule) or the college preparatory school (Gymnasium). The German education system streams students, based on their grades, to either an academically oriented education (Gymnasium), where students enroll in an Abitur program,6 or a vocational route with a shorter educational period (Hauptschule), or a mix of both (Realschule) that lasts one year longer than the Hauptschule but does not offer an Abitur. This three-tier system reflects deep social inequalities based on class and migration background. The Hauptschule has a high percentage of working-class children, largely from migrant and refugee families, while the Gymnasium remains the stronghold of the white German middle classes. Students in the Hauptschule and Realschule need to obtain qualifications equivalent to the Abitur to access post-secondary education.
The integration of students from refugee families into post-secondary educational institutions, such as research-intensive universities or more vocationally oriented schools, has been channelled through their integration into the primary and secondary education system and through the efforts of several civil institutions and actors since the summer of migration. Alarmist political debates and media reports about the influx of migrants in 2015 marked the summer of migration with the trope “refugee crisis.” Part of German civil society reacted to the new arrivals with hospitality, or what the Merkel government termed at that time Willkommenskultur (welcome culture). Local initiatives emerged, such as Teachers on the Road, an association of teachers and educators offering free German courses to refugees in refugee camps and elsewhere. Civic institutions such as trade unions, workers’ associations, and churches also organized social assistance and support for refugees, providing a broad range of additional services, including accompanying refugees to doctors or bureaucratic meetings (Karakayali 2016). This volunteerism (Yurdakul et al. 2018) was not new, however. It resulted from the anti-racist refugee social movements and their advocacy groups beginning in 2013 (see also Doppler 2021), which drew attention to their situation in Germany but also other parts of Europe, such as Austria, Belgium, and France. As Bernhard Streitwieser and Lukas Brück (2018, 43) note, this “level of civil society engagement became a critical bridge” in organizing the arrival of refugees. Some critics (Schmitz 2016) have pointed out that while motivated by political conviction and compassion, this work risked being patronizing and racist by infantilizing or exoticizing refugees as revolutionaries or treating them as inferior to the presupposed “modern European subject.” Nevertheless, between 2015 and 2017, this culture of “hospitality” opened new possibilities for the creation of support networks, providing local access to medical, health, education, work, and housing facilities.
Some of these refugee advocacy groups became active in universities, creating pathways to post-secondary education (Steinhardt and Eckhardt 2017; Streitwieser et al. 2017). At this time, most refugees had just arrived and were still in the process of applying for asylum—a status that does not confer the right to post-secondary education. The requirements for entry to post-secondary education can be summarized in three routes: (1) higher secondary education qualification, (2) German-language proficiency, and (3) proof of sufficient financial means for the course of study, including health insurance. Following university registration, international students need to apply for an international student visa in order to obtain fixed-term study residency status in Germany. The third route (point 3) to post-secondary education applies to recently arrived refugees with secondary school education qualifications equivalent to the German Abitur or who have attended university in their countries of origin.7 This last route drew the attention of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMWF) between 2015 and 2018.
Refugees could not officially apply for regular admission to university. However, most post-secondary educational institutions offered a guest-student status for refugees, allowing them to audit courses while applying for asylum. Many of the refugees who took advantage of this offer held high school diplomas and had begun university or already earned a degree in their countries of origin (Brücker, Rother, and Schupp 2016). The German federal government, in turn, implemented a funding program for prospective students seeking asylum. Funded by the BMWF, this program provided universities and preparatory colleges (Studienkollegs) with administrative support in creating additional preparatory courses (Grüttner et al. 2018). By 2016, a large number of German post-secondary institutions had partially introduced German-language preparatory courses, audit study programs, and German courses for refugees (see Streitwieser and Brück 2018). In total, eleven of the sixteen German Länder (states) launched BMWF-funded programs to promote refugees’ access to post-secondary education between 2016 and 2017. These initiatives addressed (a) the establishment of personal support through buddy or tandem programs, (b) additional German courses, (c) social interaction activities between local and international students, and (d) the creation of access routes for refugees to guest-student programs, bridging courses, or other measures aimed at preparing refugees for regular study programs (Schammann and Younso 2017; Steinhardt and Eckhardt 2017).
The BMWF worked closely with the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and other research-funding bodies, such as the Humboldt Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation, and the funding institutions affiliated with political parties, such as the Hans Böckler,8 Rosa Luxemburg,9 and Heinrich Böll10 Foundations. All of them established scholarships for at-risk students and academics fleeing war zones, authoritarian regimes, and political persecution. Furthermore, the DAAD assisted university international offices in providing audit study programs and offering German-language courses (Fourier et al. 2017). Between 2015 and 2019, the DAAD made €100 million available to implement the Integra program. As the DAAD notes, the Integra program financially supports DAAD measures “to help academically qualified refugees” access German universities “by offering language instruction and subject-specific preparatory courses” (DAAD, n.d.).
All these programs offered some access to education by enabling students with refugee status to audit courses and enroll in German courses, with the possibility of attending regular information events on campus. However, not all programs led to full access to post-secondary education. Some universities—such as the University of Applied Sciences in Magdeburg, the University of Saarbrücken, the University of Osnabrück, and the University of Göttingen—developed programs enabling students with refugee status to enroll as first-time university students or continue the studies they had initiated in their home countries. These programs provided access to specific areas of study, particularly mathematics, informatics, hard science, and technology. Other universities did not develop this access route to post-secondary education for students in the process of seeking asylum; instead, they provided an advocacy and volunteering structure that supported students seeking asylum with German classes and audit programs. Among these universities was JLU. In response to the BMWF call, and mediated through the Hessian Ministry of Higher Education and the Arts (HMWK), several projects received funding between 2016 and 2017 for initiatives that supported access for students seeking asylum. Among them was Branch Out.
Branch Out: Initial Support for Transcultural Learning
Branch Out: Initial Support for Transcultural Learning provided a teaching module in the Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences at the JLU Institute of Sociology between 2016 and 2018. Other projects funded by HMWK at the JLU Faculty of Social and Cultural Studies trained education students by promoting their intercultural skills or supported students working with refugee families and children. Established in the Professorship of General Sociology, Branch Out was interested in bridging connections between JLU students and individuals who had recently arrived in Giessen and applied for asylum and who wanted to initiate or continue their studies in Germany. To realize this aim, the Professorship of General Sociology collaborated with the Giessen refugee advocacy group an.ge.kommen e.V.11 on the Branch Out project. Established at the beginning of the summer of migration, an.ge.kommen e.V. offered support, along with German courses, and functioned as a social, cultural, and political hub for persons arriving as asylum seekers and their supporters in Giessen. Operating as a link between the university and people seeking asylum, the aim of an.ge.kommen e.V. was to work not on but together with refugees.
Branch Out was built on this conviction with the following goals: (a) to be a bridge between the university and persons seeking asylum in Giessen, (b) to offer asylum seekers introductory access to the university, and (c) to establish a transcultural learning space for major and minor students pursuing bachelor’s degrees in social sciences and asylum seekers enrolled in this program (Theuerl 2021). As part of the project, a one-year research-oriented course where students could develop a small student-led ethnographic project was established. This course was integrated into an existing third-year module in the social sciences bachelor’s program: the Lehrforschungsprojekt (fieldwork research course). The Branch Out course was offered in English and consisted of one year of fieldwork research on the topic of “arrival, city, and migration.” The course was capped at thirty students and offered twice during 2016 and 2018. A half-time lecturer—a doctoral candidate in sociology and a co-founder of an.ge.kommen e.V.—was employed for two years to run the course with HMWK funding. The course was advertised as a regular course in the social sciences bachelor’s program, and an.ge.kommen e.V. disseminated this information in their advocacy networks working with persons seeking asylum in Giessen. In response, approximately twenty people applying for asylum expressed interest in the course, with ultimately ten of them enrolling. At that time, persons seeking asylum in Hesse were transferred to the main reception center for refugees, located in Giessen. The refugee reception center—actually a refugee camp—is situated on the outskirts of town behind the main train station. Established in 1946 for German expellees from Eastern Europe, followed by displaced persons between the 1950s and 1980, the camp housed refugees from the Soviet zone and the GDR (van Laack 2017). In the 1990s, it was then transformed into the central reception center for asylum seekers in Hesse.
Between 2015 and 2017, the number of refugees arriving in Hesse increased rapidly, and the center reached full occupancy. New arrivals were thus sent to provisional camps (Lager) consisting of tents or former military barracks. Participants in the Branch Out course lived in the refugee center in Giessen or in one of the regional Lager. To ensure course attendance, funding was made available for bus and train tickets, as attendees were not registered as regular JLU students because of their legal status and were not eligible for student tickets. Branch Out worked with asylum seekers who wanted to study in Giessen. The students who were asylum seekers participated in the course through the university audit program for refugees.
Despite legal barriers for students seeking asylum, Branch Out offered them the opportunity to gain some insight into how the university functioned while also allowing interested social sciences students to meet colleagues in other disciplines, such as global health or law. These opportunities were supported by a group of teaching assistants (TAs) funded by HMWK who worked with the convenor of the Branch Out course. The TAs were last-year BA students in social sciences and education with a specific profile—namely, (a) a social science background with a focus on migration and diaspora studies, (b) experiences working with refugees and migrants, (c) transcultural competence, and (d) multilingual skills. All the TAs were active in refugee and migrant advocacy groups; came from families who had arrived in Germany as migrants or refugees from Afghanistan, Iran, or Turkey; and spoke a variety of languages such as Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Spanish, and German. As a result, the Branch Out classroom environment was multilingual. Furthermore, because the course was offered in English rather than German, it attracted major and minor social sciences BA students, international exchange students, and ERASMUS students.12 The ERASMUS students came from countries such as Spain, Italy, and Turkey, while the international students were from South Africa or Ukraine. Some of the BA students also had experience studying abroad or were from families who had experienced migration.
Besides multilingual skills, class participants also brought a variety of viewpoints to the question of migration, both from their own experiences and from having attended lectures or classes on this topic. While the German students were pursuing their regular study program, the international and ERASMUS exchange students were on their year abroad. Some of the German students had spent a year abroad at another European university. Thus, the students, the TAs, and the lecturer all shared the experience of mobility, though in very different forms: exile, migration, or spending some time abroad. While the experience of not knowing the language and being new to a place was something they all shared, only the asylum seekers had experienced dangerous, life-threatening situations during their journey, after experiencing violence, the loss of loved ones, and the destruction of their homes. These heterogeneous, sometimes conflicting experiences were productive on both methodological and conceptual levels.
These different perspectives on migration and exile were approached by forming small student working groups that developed research projects and conducted place-based ethnography by contacting initiatives and organizations that served as points of contact for newcomers to Giessen, including German organizations (for example, Caritas) working with refugees and migrants, a Kurdish organization, and neighbourhood initiatives. During this year, students reviewed the literature on migration and exile while examining methodologies such as urban ethnography, walking methods (Racleş 2021), and place-based research. They presented their research projects during the last class. Branch Out’s aims were tailored to the students’ needs. While the German and international students pursued their regular course units, for those in the asylum process, the course gave them access to the university and the city’s support structures in regard to education, health care, the job market, religion, childcare, and social activities. A safe space was created for those seeking asylum with the aim of offering support, “partial allyship” (Sempértegui 2019), and practical solidarity (Garbe 2021). Efforts were made to create an inclusive, non-discriminatory classroom.
In summary, there were three elements in the goals of this class: (a) immediate access to the university for persons seeking asylum, (b) cooperative learning for all participants, and (c) place-oriented fieldwork for all participants. Branch Out drew on the buddy model by establishing partnerships between local students and newly arrived persons but went beyond by fostering common transcultural learning practices drawing on experiential and placed-based knowledge (Theuerl 2021). This was achieved by creating small working groups of social sciences students, asylum seekers, and ERASMUS and international exchange students. The Branch Out classroom was a microcosm that could be described using Mary Louise Pratt’s (1991) concept of contact zones: social spaces “where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (34). In the Branch Out microcosm, teaching and learning evolved transculturally, demonstrating the potential, but also limits, of creating access to the university for persons seeking asylum.
The Limits and Potential of Transcultural Learning Within the Context of Asylum Seeking
Branch Out operated under the assumption that the classroom is a site of transcultural encounters and disencounters (Ortiz 1995) that occur on the grounds of antagonistic relationships shaped by entangled global inequalities (Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Reddock 2021). Drawing on Pratt (1991) and Ortiz (1995), Branch Out considered the university as a transcultural contact zone, a perspective that framed the learning and teaching approach. Within JLU as a transcultural contact zone, four issues had to be navigated: (a) power relations in the classroom, (b) the diverse entry points to learning, (c) multilingualism, and (d) the structures of individual and class support.
Research conducted by the groups introduced local and newly arrived students to the university and the support infrastructure in Giessen. Furthermore, while becoming acquainted with support networks and institutions, students took courses in sociological qualitative and ethnographic research, exploring stories of escape and migration. However, despite this common learning course, students did not meet on equal terms. Their educational, economic, institutional, and cultural lives differed. Thus, while the German and international students were completing their majors or minors in the social sciences bachelor’s program, the persons seeking asylum had only partly completed their bachelor’s degrees, mainly in areas not related to social sciences. Their interest in this course emerged from their aim to access the university, and this particular course offered partial access to it through its audit program. Even course attendance did not provide them with regular student status. Access to student status was tied to German university requirements, German-language proficiency, recognition of their acquired school and study degrees abroad, basic income, and proof of local accommodation (Weiser 2016). For persons seeking asylum or in the status of Duldung (a limited legitimation of the right to remain that is given to persons who cannot be deported based on health issues or personal vulnerabilities), these requirements were hardly achievable, as very often they lacked German-language proficiency, their degrees were not homologized, and their income and housing facilities were precarious. Undocumented migrants do lack any legal access to education.
In addition to limited access to post-secondary education, Branch Out attendees also experienced economic hardship and transportation problems. As applicants for asylum, they were obliged to live in initial reception facilities for six weeks to a maximum of twenty-four months, though this time period was often exceeded. These housing facilities were composed of old military barracks, abandoned buildings, or emergency tent compounds on the outskirts of villages or towns. The participants of Branch Out lived under these circumstances. As already mentioned, most of them lived in the refugee camp in Giessen or other nearby Lager; their travel to the university was organized through crowd-funding support because they did not receive any financial support at all. As they did not have student identification cards because they were not registered as regular students, they could not access the basic infrastructure providing IT facilities, housing, and access to student cafeterias or sports facilities. Branch Out was able to facilitate limited access to the library, the cafeteria, and e-class facilities while voicing concerns about these limitations in the university-created network for refugee affairs, which operated from 2015 to 2019. As a result, temporary access to some of the university’s facilities was made available during this time. However, no institutional changes were made to provide refugees enrolled with audit status permanent access to the broader university infrastructure.
On the cultural level, language was a major barrier, as German was the language of instruction for most courses, with very few offered in English. Furthermore, proficiency in languages other than German and previous academic training of class members varied according to their class and educational background. In terms of gender, although the class as a whole was composed of an equal number of self-identified women and men, most of the refugee students were men. This in part reflected the fact that there were fewer women among the refugees who arrived in Giessen. Nevertheless, this fact does not deter from the need to develop a tailored approach toward women in the refugee camps, including mothers, as refugee political self-organised groups such as Women in Exile e.V.13 and International Women* Space14 do. As research on this question demonstrates (Negin and Dryden-Peterson 2017), childcare provision as well as the inclusion of digital education might open other avenues to facilitate the participation of refugee women in post-secondary education, considering that this group shows a high educational achievement profile (Brücker et al. 2019).
Despite these institutional limitations, Branch Out created an interactive space of communal learning and teaching. While some of the refugee students did not know when their applications for asylum would be processed or how long they would live in Giessen or Germany, they were still able to establish relationships of trust and reliance with their peers. The inequalities structuring the classroom were determined by the impact of asylum and migration policies on the students subjected to these regulations, in particular those seeking asylum. The students with German passports or passports from other EU member states had not experienced personal harm caused by asylum and migration control policies. However, Europeans, particularly German students racialized as Black, persons of colour, or migrants, though they had legal residency status as citizens, shared some of the experiences of everyday institutional racism at the university. These experiences of othering and racism were reflected upon in the classroom.
Some of the refugee students were not able to continue with Branch Out because they were moved to other refugee camps in other parts of Germany or their attendance was interrupted due to the schedule and demands of the bureaucracies processing their applications for asylum. Despite the barriers to entering the university that students seeking asylum encountered, Branch Out facilitated access to the university. Out of the group of refugee students attending the course, three were able to enroll in master’s courses at German universities following the approval of their asylum applications. In general, all the students gained insight into the support structure for new arrivals to the city of Giessen. For the BA students at JLU, this course was unique: their learning practices connected with their immediate lives. The place-based ethnography enabled them to reflect on the immediate historical entanglements shaping their lives and to understand society through this angle. Migration was no longer an abstract concept in a textbook or on the news but became a lived experience connected to their own lives. For the ERASMUS and international students, this course helped them understand the global character of a local phenomenon. They often compared the situation in Germany with their countries of origin, introducing a comparative perspective on the subject of migration. The course also offered the students applying for asylum the possibility to connect to other working groups and networks at JLU, such as the Research Network on Human Rights and Migration. The Branch Out experience was shared with colleagues in the JLU task force group on refugees and in Germany-wide networks of universities working with refugees coordinated by the Berlin Center on Integration and Migration.
From a short-term perspective, Branch Out as a pilot project was unique in its approach to heterogeneous learning backgrounds and place-based analysis. It also succeeded in creating a classroom that challenged the nation-state border logic by admitting students whose regular access was denied by asylum policies. For a module in sociology, this was an extraordinary experience and opened up the possibility for universities to actively take part in challenging the space of learning by beginning to transform the classroom and thus contribute to the creation of an inclusive, anti-racist society. However, the university was unable to continue with the project due to a lack of funding. By autumn 2015, the welcoming political climate of the summer of migration had abruptly veered in the opposite direction. Following the 2015 New Year’s Eve incident in Cologne, racist imaginaries went viral, fuelled by rapidly growing hostility against refugees among certain segments of the German population (Carastathis et al. 2018). This expression of anti-refugee racism also became evident in the national elections of 2017, where the extreme right party received an increase in votes. The models of anti-racist inclusive classrooms in post-secondary education trialled in the wake of the summer of migration did not result in any lasting institutional commitments on the level of anti-discrimination strategies in German universities. Given these circumstances, concrete measures for building the anti-racist intersectional university require further consideration.
Conclusion: Building the Anti-racist University—an Ongoing Project
In this chapter, I have discussed the relationship between refugees and post-secondary education in Germany using the case of the pilot project Branch Out. Focusing on the broader engagement of German universities in providing access to post-secondary education between 2015 and 2018, I have discussed the specific characteristics of Branch Out and its potential to delineate a new learning horizon by creating a multilingual transcultural classroom. I have also critiqued the lack of institutionalization of inclusive intersectional transcultural learning projects in German post-secondary education. Following other researchers in the field, I assert that this recent development of access to post-secondary education for refugees in Germany has been unique and needs to be further developed. To enable this development, as other researchers (Jungblut, Vukasovic, and Steinhardt 2020) argue, several criteria for controlling access to post-secondary education in Germany need to be reformed.
First, the requirement for German-language proficiency needs to be adjusted. Due to the demand for German-language proficiency, refugee students who participated in pathway programs to gain access to the university were not able to complete this program because they could not meet the language requirements (Aver 2018; Fourier et al. 2018; Schiffauer, Eilert, and Rudloff 2017; Trautwein 2015). The German-language proficiency requirement, currently C1, should be lowered or replaced by a subject-specific language proficiency (Unangst 2019). Second, potential health problems related to depression and trauma should be taken into account. Third, financial hurdles to university study need to be considered (Stifterverband 2017). If these barriers are addressed, as some researchers note, the German experience can represent “a chance for universities to scale up services for all students” and enable refugee students’ access to higher education (Streitwieser and Unangst 2018, 16). As the DAAD’s programs Integra and Welcome have shown, providing refugees with German-language and preparatory university courses, along with offering alternative routes to higher education via credential assessment and subject matter competency testing, might represent some valid options (ibid.). Furthermore, as Bernhard Streitwieser and Lisa Unangst (2018, 16) note, universities need to address equality-sensitive aspects because “refugees have to work through socioemotional trauma, asylum uncertainty, and a societal backlash.”
If the anti-racist, intersectional, and inclusive work conducted in universities does not translate into institutional changes, then well-intentioned inclusion offers no more than empty promises. As Bernhard Streitwieser and Lukas Brück (2018, 44) note, these inclusion measures can “set up unrealistic expectations for some refugee students” by creating the impression that they have been enrolled or accepted as students; however, auditing courses offers them only temporary and limited access to the university. On another level, researchers have proposed that a change be made to the admission criteria level access mark (Numerus Clausus) for refugee students, and all students in general, and have called for emergency funds for housing, transportation, food, and books as well as fellowships for refugees. In the case of Branch Out, the university’s general audit study program focused only on refugees with a fixed status, while those in the process of seeking asylum were not included. However, Branch Out worked with persons seeking asylum and communicated this to the international office, creating an exception to the audit program for Branch Out participants. A long-term engagement with a transcultural model of education enabling access for persons wishing to complete their studies in Germany while seeking asylum requires further institutionalization. Programs addressing the needs of women seeking asylum need to be considered within established gender equity and promotion policies and processes in universities. Branch Out argued for the need to develop inclusion strategies in the university for all refugees irrespective of gender identity and those seeking asylum by supporting their access to post-secondary education. As Dryden-Peterson and Giles (2012) argue, access to post-secondary education for refugees is a tool to achieve autonomy and agency. Furthermore, the Branch Out experience argues for the incorporation of anti-discrimination awareness and transcultural learning/teaching methods as pillars of the curriculum and classroom levels in universities.
On a more general level, inclusion in post-secondary education provides all citizens with the potential for social transformation and is a vital tool in decolonizing the university. This means that, first and foremost, migration and border control policies that subject human beings to administrative devices, preventing them from accessing basic human rights such as the right to education, need to be abolished. Everyone, despite their legal residency status, should have access to education, including post-secondary education. Refugees having started their studies in their countries of origin previous to their leaving should have immediate access to their careers. It is incomprehensible, for example, to publicly state that there is a shortage of doctors in Germany, while medical school students from Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, and Egypt are not allowed to study while they are in the process of applying for asylum.
Considering the abolition of migration and asylum control policies as instruments of dehumanization, deployed against persons seeking refuge and a better life, represents the first step in the project of decolonizing the university. Decolonizing the university means here striving for racial, gender, economic, and social justice. This is an urgent task in order to work through Europe’s complicity in the creation of global inequalities that are rooted in its colonial, settler-colonial, and imperial activities and contemporary political and economic interests. The conversation on reparations for European atrocities committed during colonialism in Africa, for example, remains an open question in Germany. Why do we not think about these reparations from the angle of the asylum-migration nexus and what it would mean in regard to the provision of post-secondary education access for refugees?
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Anna Kirova for her insightful comments and Michele Faguet for her thorough reading of this chapter.
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1 See International Movement for the Evacuation of Moria (2020).
2 See Deutscher Bundestag (2020).
3 See European Commission (2020).
4 See European Commission (2023).
5 See European Commission (2020).
6 The Abitur is the German access exam for university.
7 Among recently arrived refugees, 17 percent have started a post-secondary degree, 11 percent have completed a post-secondary degree, 44 percent aspire to complete a secondary degree, and 68 percent are interested in a professional or academic career (see DIW Berlin 2022).
8 See home page: https://www.boeckler.de/de/index.htm.
9 See home page: https://www.rosalux.de/.
10 See home page: https://www.boell.de/en/startpage.
11 See web page: http://angekommen-giessen.de.
12 ERASMUS is a European Union student exchange program that takes place between European universities.
14 The organization International Women* Space is actively engaged in the self-political organizing of Black refugee and migrant women against border and migration necropolitics. They work on access to health, education, and politics for refugees. See https://iwspace.de.
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