Category: Uncategorized (Page 4 of 14)

Germany’s left-wing party Die Linke won Berlin’s state election on September 20, with lead candidate Elif Eralp poised to become Berlin’s next mayor. But less than two years ago, Die Linke was perceived to be in decline, making its decisive victory particularly stunning as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) prevailed in other parts of the country. Eralp’s triumph demonstrates that Berlin voters are unsatisfied with the center, especially as a housing crisis grips the city, and have an appetite for unyielding resistance to the AfD.

“Until the federal elections in 2025, the conventional wisdom was that [Die Linke] was on the way out,” said Jan-Werner Müller, a German political philosopher and Professor of Politics at Princeton University. “But if your number one concern is to keep as far away from the far right as possible, Die Linke is all of a sudden a plausible option.”

Die Linke’s triumph can’t solely be ascribed to establishment parties’ increasingly conciliatory approach to the far right. Eralp campaigned relentlessly on Berlin’s housing crisis, a winning message as advertised rents in the city have more than doubled since 2014 and many landlords seek to subvert rent control laws. “Opinion polls suggest that the voters for each party were concerned in particular about one key issue,” noted Maria Mitchell, a professor of Modern European History at Franklin & Marshall College. “For voters supporting Die Linke, it was housing.”

Germany’s mainstream parties maintain a “firewall,” or informal consensus to avoid collaboration with the far-right. Motivated by a desire to safeguard democracy from extremist elements, the tradition has endured since the end of World War II. However, the demarcation has been tested recently by growing willingness from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the center-right party leading Germany’s governing coalition, to cooperate with the AfD, especially on migration matters. In January 2025, CDU leader and current Chancellor Friedrich Merz introduced an anti-immigration bill in the Bundestag, relying on AfD support in a vote that failed by only a small margin. And on October 6, Tobias Rausch of the AfD was elected parliamentary speaker of Saxony-Anhalt – the first time since World War II that a far-right party garnered such an influential post – with four votes from the CDU.

Müller attributes Die Linke’s success at least in part to their status as the most uncompromising bulwark against the AfD. Although the CDU and the center-left Green Party have long been considered rivals, Greens leaders have made overtures to the CDU this year. Greens co-leader Felix Banaszak told Deutsche Welle that the rise of the far right, unprecedented in postwar Germany, calls for a “union of the political mainstream.” But some voters, Müller believes, may interpret the openness to compromise of conventional left-leaning parties such as the Social Democrats and the Greens as an indirect concession to extremism. 

“Even though the Greens would never collaborate with the far right, if the Greens are willing to work with the Christian Democrats and the Christian Democrats increasingly go soft on the far right, it can look like they’re legitimating something deeply problematic,” he said. 

As the AfD banks its political fortunes on a xenophobic platform, mainstream parties have responded by veering rightward on migration. Müller described a trend of Germany’s centrist parties “copying elements of far-right rhetoric on migration.” Although they are known for pro-migration policies, even the Greens have recently expressed a hardened position on issues such as deportations. “It’s understandable that people might want a choice that’s uncompromising in this regard,” Müller said of Die Linke.

In this increasingly anti-migrant political milieu, Die Linke’s welcoming posture was attractive to Berlin’s diverse population. “About ¼ of Berliners are not German citizens, and almost one-third have immigrant backgrounds,” said Mitchell. “Die Linke’s pro-immigrant stance appealed to those voters.”

But Eralp’s rise is also symptomatic of a broader trend. The German electorate is increasingly spurning centrist parties and gravitating towards both the far right and left, Mitchell explained. “In the Berlin elections, the establishment parties…all lost votes compared to the last election,” she said. “The only parties to increase their results were those on the far right (the AfD) and far left.”

The turn to Die Linke suggests a possible ideological realignment on Berlin’s left. Early data from ARD’s tagesschau, a public television news program, shows that Die Linke gained an estimated 57,000 votes from the Greens and mobilized an additional 75,000 former nonvoters. Although these figures are preliminary, left-leaning voters’ disillusionment with traditional center-left parties indicates an enthusiasm for bolder proposals. 

With its left-leaning voter base, Berlin can’t be interpreted as a microcosm for Germany writ large. The left may be on the rise in Berlin, but the far-right is also ascendant, with a historic victory for the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt. “It is unlikely that Die Linke will dominate elections in other Bundesländer,” said Mitchell, “but its national fortunes are rising as support for establishment parties declines.”

by Devon Williams

While reading The New Censorship, I was struck by how much of the current distrust in the media, fueled by populist political leaders, ties into key psychology frameworks of groupthink and manipulative mental control. Panievsky repeatedly states that one of the main ways that these extremist figures gain unlikely power is through hours and hours of airtime. Whether it is through social media soundbites or repeated interviews with a variety of outlets regardless of their perceived political leaning, the main thing these figures need is to be visible (68). Their actual policy is nearly negligible in these interactions– it is their inflammatory nature and the reaction they are able to garner from journalists and the audience alike that causes their visibility to increase seemingly exponentially. In psychology, this concept is called the mere exposure effect– the more someone sees something/someone or hears a certain ideology, the more likely it is that they a) normalize it b) perceive it as a popular and wide held belief in their community and the world and/or c) begin to sympathize with it themselves. These politicians are capitalizing on the fact that the human brain learns and interacts with the world through familiarity, and it is that familiarity that over time numbs people to extremism and later could cause them to believe in it.

Panievsky echoes this sentiment, stating that “political elites tend to over-estimate how right-wing or conservative the public actually is” (71) and extends this tendency to the public and to journalists themselves. Left-leaning people tend to overestimate the most, she continues, as a form of ‘overcorrection’ for what they believe their own bias to be. Conservatives, however, do the opposite, yet still lean towards a belief right-wing beliefs and extremism are more common than they actually are. This is because “those more vocal are perceived to be more numerous” (73), highlighting another psychological principle: availability bias. We have already established that the most extremist and right wing figures currently are doing their best to be on air as much as possible, attempting to become unavoidable in the public ethos. This constant exposure means that when one thinks of politics, their mind employs a heuristic (a mental ‘shortcut’ to grasp large or abstract concepts and create a quick judgement on a situation) to decide what they have heard recently, how often, and from whom. Heuristics are employed by the brain more often than not; a person likely won’t think long and hard about every single video they have seen, count the numbers, account for social media targeting etc. when considering the current political atmosphere in a short span of time. They will attach to whatever appears first in their mind, and with the inundation of content from extremists, they will likely guess that those beliefs are more common, widespread, and representative than they actually are just because they are most ‘available’ in memory.

These two concepts in tandem — the mere exposure effect and availability bias — produce another interesting effect within an individual. The perception that extremism is more common and accepted by your surrounding society will push you to be more open to it and to participate in it more willingly as a way to fit in with the perceived ‘group’ as a form of self preservation. If it is greater acceptance of hate speech, voicing racist and biased opinions more often, or even not objecting to that cruelty and extremism is a result of this powerful effect (80-81). These conditions together allow extremist figures to gain a platform, convince us their views are wide-held and ‘normal’, all while convincing you to accept it or drift closer to that same extremism for what your brain believes to be self preservation by remaining with the in-group. The only way that extremism can be combatted by a society is to be aware not only of the fact that those views are not normal or accepted but also why exactly people react to them the way they do through our brains’ hard-wiring.

On Tuesday, September 29, the Supreme Court temporarily ruled that the Trump administration can deport immigrants to third-countries, or a country other than the one they consider their homeland. The ruling comes as a win for the Trump administration amidst a slew of cases set to be heard by the Supreme Court relating to migrants and immigrants. The emergency ruling went unsigned, as is normal for these one-page rulings. Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the three liberal justices on the court, noted they would not have voted in favor of resuming third country deportations.

Deborah Pearlstein, Director of Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Policy, notes in a written statement notes how, as this case is an “‘interim’ decision on [the Court’s] ‘emergency’ or ‘shadow’ docket…the Court hasn’t actually yet decided the important Due Process issue in the case – it has just said the administration can continue its existing policy while the case challenging its legality is making its way through the Courts.”

Douglas S. Massey, an Emeritus professor of Sociology at Princeton University, shared in a written statement “I would think the policy [of third country deportations] violates both the 5th and 14th Amendments. It’s part of a process known as ‘crimmigration’: treating what had been civil infractions of immigration law as criminal offices.” 

He continues that “the Trump administration has cut the funding and personnel for immigration courts, compelling judges to resort to short cuts such as collective trials and hearings that effectively deny immigrants a chance to defend themselves.” The second Trump administration fired around 25 percent of immigration judges while around 3 million cases are in the Immigration court backlog and 2.3 million immigrants await asylum hearings. While this year, around 750 thousand immigrants have been ordered to be deported, only 24 percent of those immigrants served a removal order had an attorney in Immigration court. 

As of early September, the Trump administration sent at least 25,000 immigrants to a minimum of 29 third-countries. Many of these countries are undergoing active armed conflicts and are widely considered unsafe, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, and South Sudan. According to United States law, the government may not deport persons to any country where they shall be persecuted, tortured, or sent into harm.

In March of 2025, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem posted a video of herself at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), a maximum security prison in El Salvador, and one of the confirmed locations for third country deportations. Her message: “President Trump and I have a clear message to criminal illegal aliens: LEAVE NOW.  If you do not leave, we will hunt you down, arrest you, and you could end up in this El Salvadorian prison.” There have been reports of sexual violence, torture, and solitary at the facility towards asylum seekers. Around 300 deportees have been sent to CECOT by the Trump administration. 

Another one of the prisons the United States is using third country deportation processes to send migrants to is a complex in Juba, South Sudan known to have unsafe living conditions. These men were transferred to South Sudan after a lower U.S. federal court had issued a block on third country deportations and prior to the Supreme Court’s temporary reversal on September 29th. South Sudan is one of the poorest nations in the world and is actively fighting a high-casualty civil war. 

The Supreme Court has fast tracked the case and will hear oral arguments in December. The final ruling on the case can be expected in the next year.

Germany’s far-right party, the AfD, has recently opted for the country to remove its support for Ukraine. This comes almost a week after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz travelled to Kyiv to announce a €1.3 billion German aid package towards military and energy support for Ukraine. Merz’s party, the Christian Democratic Union, is a centre-right party, but it could not be further at odds with the AfD over this matter. The political divide in Germany has always been present, but at this time it seems wider than ever before.

Many experts are left wondering why, but they still attempt to find a reason for this gap.

“A lot of what’s happening in Germany has already happened here,” said Barbara Nagel, a professor in the German department at Princeton who grew up in Northeim, Lower Saxony. In the months after the Trump administration came into power, Nagel saw a dip in statistics supporting the AfD, showing that it had been harmed. “I was hoping for some time, but with the last elections, that hope diminished,” she said.

Joseph Vogl, a professor in the German department at Princeton University, discussed separating history into elements to understand where this divide all began. The planning for Trump’s America, which has influenced the AfD, began much earlier than you might think, he said. Trump’s far-right bid their time; Vogl calls it “long preparation”, and the inauguration of the Heritage Foundation in the 1970’s prepared them for the 2024 U.S. elections, giving them a 50-year head start.

The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the Trump administration’s success in 2024, when conspiracies, controversies, and the very nature of public life were called into question.

“The pandemic was an important moment; it was the emergence of social media, which suddenly created a completely new public sphere,” Vogl said. These elements, combined, Vogl thinks, have been important in the rise of the far-right across Europe and have contributed to the party divide in Germany.

To make sense of why the far-right is so successful, Nagel used an anecdote from a class she taught at Princeton during the Covid-19 pandemic. Nagel split the group into two and began a debate: one group argued for why vaccinations are necessary, and the other took on the role of conspiracy theorist anti-vaxxers. The group that argued against vaccines had infinitely more fun; they were able to make an abundance of irrational arguments.

“When we stopped, we were all so depressed, we hadn’t thought of this consciousness, of this joy of making counter-rational arguments,” she said, “I work on rhetoric, so I thought after that, Oh man, like this, we are doomed,” she continued.

Nagel wonders if the AfD learned their absurdity from Trump. “You know, [the AfD] is the party that called the Holocaust chicken shit, that is the party where Alice Weidel said that Hitler was a left-wing terrorist,” she said. Nagel thinks the AfD says things that are so absurd that they cannot be fact-checked. They maintain the intent to confuse and disorient, and it’s all for their own enjoyment, like the students in her class, who once derived great enjoyment from debating using irrational statements.

It must be noted that Die Linke, the leading Left party, won in Berlin’s September 2026 state elections, making this the first time a German-Turkish politician could become the mayor in Berlin. This shows that left-wing parties are “rejuvenating” themselves, but right-wing parties are too. “I’m afraid that the AfD will become the biggest party,” Nagel said.

The ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia has worsened the economic state in Germany. The energy restrictions on Russian gas, coupled with Trump’s tariffs, have caused a foreign crisis.  Nagel explained that her friends at home in Germany are struggling financially, and she believes that companies raising prices by 300% “because of the war” are not justified. Rather, they are using the war as an excuse to capitalise.

“People feel really worried about humiliation, being unemployed. I would be, too,” she said.

Germany’s AfD gives a reason for its wish to stop providing foreign aid to Ukraine. According to a recent Reuters article, Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD leader in Saxony-Anhalt, presses CDU leader Merz to shift his focus to a campaign to end the war rather than to providing foreign aid to Ukraine. Siegmund wants the aid money to stay within Germany, “for the people in our country,” he said. However, it is not that simple.

“Putin is not going to stop the war. He just cannot stop it. He needs to continue the war for years and years because if he stops the war, the Russian economy is going to collapse faster than if he continues,” said Oksana Nesterenko, a Ukrainian public policy analyst and anti-corruption activist who works in Princeton’s SPIA (School of Public and International Affairs) department. According to this ideology, Siegmund is not truly interested in the end of the war because it is not possible. At the moment, he is more interested in retaining money in Germany.

Nagel thought about the state of politics in Germany, “all of this is depressing,” she said, believing that AfD will gain enough votes to take power in the future.

“Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral,” a phrase in German she said, “It means first you need to eat, and then you can have morals.” Working-class people will not pursue altruistic politics; they’ll think of themselves first. If the AfD promises people a better life, people will vote for them, and the party will prevail.

As governments around the world cut aid funding, humanitarian leaders are looking to philanthropists for money. They are also reevaluating how to best spend it in these desperate times.

“Humanitarian needs are outpacing resources,” said Barham Salih, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) at the annual Clinton Global Initiative in New York City. “We are speaking today at a time when there is an unprecedented record of forcibly displaced people around the world. Nearly 25 million refugees have been displaced for 5 years or more and around 14 and a half million remain dependent on humanitarian assistance for basic needs.”

As the refugee crisis grows, donor governments are retreating. In July of 2025, President Trump officially dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), exacerbating humanitarian crises worldwide. Just a few months before, the UK government announced a reduction in their foreign aid budget from 0.5% to 0.3% of the gross national income, the lowest level in decades. Over the last three years, across all public donors, humanitarian funding dropped by nearly 30%, the most drastic sustained decline in recorded history. Donor governments are prioritizing military spending instead. 

“It’s the exact opposite direction we need to go,” said Ambassador Rick Barton, former Deputy High Commissioner for the UNHCR. 

Part of the problem is that politicians have failed to make the case against engaging in costly wars. “I think we’ve really got to build a constituency for peace,” Barton said. “We have just not articulated the benefits of prevention versus the inefficiencies, and the grotesque expenditures, and the torturing of society that war produces.” 

The result is that more money has been funneled into combat, and less is available to provide for civilians in crisis. Researchers at Boston University estimated that the USAID cuts have already caused six hundred thousand deaths, the majority of them children.

Philanthropists are stepping up where they can. Several foundation leaders announced new commitments to action at the Clinton Global Initiative in September. Dr. Nahla Gadalla, CEO of the Sudanese American Medical Association, spoke about establishing a permanent humanitarian relief center in eastern Chad, which will provide essential services to over 1 million Sudanese refugees who fled the ongoing civil war. Laura Miller, CEO of the War Child Alliance, revealed a $100 million grant going toward mental health and wellbeing for 10 million children affected by conflict, to be distributed over the next decade. Direct Relief CEO Amy Weaver is launching a $40 million campaign to allocate towards maternal health in conflict and disaster zones.

At the conference, Salih encouraged the UNHCR’s partners to consider the longevity of stability in the regions they support. “I do believe strongly that we really need to move beyond the concept of managing displacement year on end. We need to have a pathway to giving people the agency they deserve.”

There’s been a long-standing frustration, Barton elaborated, that aid only serves to save “a life today in order to save it again tomorrow.” This inability to move beyond recurring crises may stem from a paternalistic approach to aid. That is, many donors are hesitant to let local forces lead the rebuilding process. 

“There’s been more of an effort to take power and authority away from people in the field and sort of centralizing authority back at a headquarters in Washington or Paris or Rome or wherever, and that’s not good because I think the people that are best positioned to figure out the solutions are the people that are right at the site of the disaster,” said Princeton lecturer Doug Mercado, who has decades of experience directing emergency operations and post-conflict recovery.

Direct cash grants are one way to shift the power back to local actors. Carolyn Makinson, former executive director of the International Rescue Committee UK and the Women’s Refugee Commission, recalled the funding model of GiveDirectly, a non-profit which provides unconditional cash assistance to households in need.

“They had almost zero overhead, and they found very clever ways in settings, whether they were humanitarian or development settings, of identifying absolutely the poorest people in the community,” she said. “They just gave them cash grants, and it was quite remarkable what happened.”

“Cash preserves dignity and choice while also supporting long-term self-reliance when linked to education, livelihoods, and income-generating opportunities,” Salih said. 

Investments in long-term recovery, though important, may need to take a backseat for now, as foreign aid cuts have made meeting even basic needs for survivors of war and disaster difficult.     

Mercado emphasized the importance of reestablishing a disaster response agency to save the lives most imminently at risk. Philanthropists alone cannot accomplish this. Government aid spending must resume, he said. “You can’t do more with less. You’ve got to do less with less.”

Devon Williams

Berlin Project Memo (Draft)

For my Berlin project, I want to focus on how Syrian women have chosen to integrate (or not integrate) into German culture and belonging, examining first a woman centered community garden in Neukölln as a location starting point. I am interested to know if religion shapes this process of integration either positively or negatively as well as the initial immigration process itself. I do not want to enter into reporting assuming this to be a specific issue, however, so I will shape this angle based on conversations I have with women I meet in the garden and asking them what their lives look like in Berlin and what impacts their sense of belonging and self there.

This primary reporting site is the Hevrîn Xelef medicinal-herb garden, run by Flamingo e.V. on the former St. Jacobi cemetery in Neukölln. Flamingo is a Berlin-based nonprofit association that focused on support for refugee women, created the garden in 2019 as a transcultural women-centered space connected to the women’s village Jinwar in northeastern Syria, creating a haven of culture, language, and gender for this migrant population within Germany. The garden provides community members with gardening experience, horticultural knowledge, exchange, remembrance, and support for women with experiences of migration and displacement across all places of origin. The garden is also currently the basis of the Humboldt Forum exhibition Dara Tûyê – The Mulberry Tree: Feminist Voices on War and Gardens, which runs from Nov. 29, 2025 through Aug. 30, 2027 and focuses on women, displacement, violence, healing, and cross-border solidarity.

Syrian women are my chosen population because they are the subject of diverging German policy. In 2025, it was reported that 7,548 former Syrian citizens were naturalized in Berlin, meaning that Syrians were the largest immigrant group receiving citizenship that year. In contrast, the federal government has recently been promoting return to Syria for some of these immigrants. Chancellor Friederich Merz met Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa on March 30 of this year, with Merz stating that changing conditions in Syria meant protection needs would have to be reassessed and to emphasize creating a realistic plan for Syrian return. On September 21, 2026, the Interior Ministry echoed that Syrian protection statuses could be reviewed in the medium term if conditions continued to stabilize yet also stressed that removal decisions remain ‘individual.’

This parallel drives me to the question of how Syrian women approach integration after spending years learning the language and building lives in Berlin while German politics are increasingly discussing the possibility of a return to Syria.

The recent suspension of ordinary family reunification policies under Section 36a for people with subsidiary protection beginning July 24, 2025 through July 23, 2027, which could make family separation extremely urgent and difficult for those currently residing in Germany, would also be a possible topic of interest to explore within this framework of gender, religion, and race in Berlin. Access to integration courses was also curtailed when in December 2025, BAMF stopped granting new voluntary admissions to specific categories of migrants without an automatic entitlement. Berlin’s Senate Commissioner Katarina Niewiedzial said in February 2026 that this could eliminate roughly 8,000 places in integration courses in the city. 

In terms of religion, I want to ask Muslim and non-Muslim Syrian women what role faith plays within their community in Germany, whether that is in insular Syrian immigrant communities or the broader multicultural landscape of Berlin itself. I want to investigate if presenting visibly Muslim impacts these migrants’ interaction with the largely non-Muslim city and what support Muslim immigrant institutions and centers of faith provide for those living within that culturally foreign context. I would like to speak to people who vary by age, religious affiliation, profession, family situation, length of residency in Germany, and immigration status if possible.

My plan during the trip to Berlin would be to interview many women with differing backgrounds at the garden, and use those conversations to hone in on specific issues most pertinent to them at this specific moment in time. I would then speak to immigration advocates, researchers, women’s and faith organizations, and government officials to contextualize these personal stories within the current policy of German immigration.

Sources Seeking to Contact

• Flamingo e.V. / Hevrîn Xelef Garden
  • mail@flamingo-berlin.org
• Yasmin Merei / Women for Common Spaces — Female Voices in Exile
  • y.merei@womenforcommonspaces.org
  • info@womenforcommonspaces.org
• HÎNBÛN (Women’s counseling center for immigrant women)
  • info@hinbun.de
  • +49 30 336 6662
• DaMigra — Dachverband der Migrantinnenorganisationen (Umbrella womens’ migrant association)
  • Berlin: berlin@damigra.de
  • presse@damigra.de.
  • DaMigra contacts
• Prof. Gökçe Yurdakul, Humboldt University / Berlin Institute for Migration and Integration Research (religion, Muslim identity, gender / belonging) 
  • gokce.yurdakul@sowi.hu-berlin.de. 
• CLAIM — Alliance Against Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Hate
  • presse@claim-allianz.de. 
• Katarina Niewiedzial / Berlin Senate Commissioner for Participation, Integration and Migration (city policy, integration courses and Berlin’s refugee infrastructure) 
  • presse@intmig.berlin.de 
  • integrationsbeauftragte@intmig.berlin.de. 
• BAMF press office — (integration-course access and Syrian protection reviews) 
  • pressestelle@bamf.bund.de
  • +49 911 943-17799
• Flüchtlingsrat Berlin  (legal-policy interpretation on protection status and family reunification– no refugee contacts for student projects. 
  • buero@fluechtlingsrat-berlin.de.  
  • Flüchtlingsrat Berlin

News Sources

• Halasz, Gabor. “Antrittsbesuch von al-Scharaa: Umstrittenes Treffen und eine Zahl, die Schlagzeilen macht.” Tagesschau, 30 Mar. 2026.
  Article
• Intemann, Gabriele. “Regierung will sparen: Freiwillige Integrationskurse eingestellt.” Tagesschau, 12 Feb. 2026.
  Article
• Mackenzie, James. “Germany’s Merz Says Berlin Will Work with Syria to Return Refugees.” Reuters, 30 Mar. 2026.
  Article
• Matschurek, Sönke. “‘Ich fühlte mich sicherer’: Was die Kürzung bei Integrationskursen für Berlin bedeutet.” Der Tagesspiegel Checkpoint, 16 Feb. 2026.
  Article
• Moulson, Geir. “German Lawmakers Vote to Suspend Family Reunions for Many Migrants.” Associated Press, 27 June 2025.
  Article
• rbb24. “Statistisches Bundesamt: Mehr Einbürgerungen in Berlin und Brandenburg verzeichnet.” rbb24, 3 June 2026.
  Article
• Vogt, Luisa. “Ein Ort der Trauer, der Heilung und der Stärke.” Good News Magazin, 19 June 2026.
  Article
• Whittle, Helen. “Germany Suspends Refugees’ Family Reunification.” Deutsche Welle, 27 June 2025.
  Article
• Zimmermann, Jan. “Neue Lage im Heimatland: Immer mehr Syrer verlieren ihren Schutzstatus.” Tagesschau, 16 Aug. 2026.
  Article
• “Bundesamt für Migration stoppt seit Dezember 2025 Zulassungen für Integrationskurse.” n-tv, 4 Feb. 2026. AFP/Correctiv reporting.
  Article

Primary and Official Sources

• Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg. “Einbürgerungen auf Rekordhoch.” Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg, 2026.
  Official statistics
• Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge. “Was ist ein Integrationskurs?” BAMF.
  Official explanation
• Bundesregierung. “Pressekonferenz von Bundeskanzler Friedrich Merz und dem Präsidenten der Arabischen Republik Syrien, Ahmed al-Scharaa.” 30 Mar. 2026.
  Official transcript
• Bundesregierung. “Regierungspressekonferenz vom 21. September 2026.” 21 Sept. 2026.
  Official transcript
• Federal Foreign Office. “Important Information: Suspension of Family Reunification with Beneficiaries of Subsidiary Protection.” 2025.
  Official notice
• Flamingo e.V. “Heilkräutergarten Hevrîn Xelef.” Flamingo e.V.
  Project page
• Flamingo e.V. “Über Flamingo e.V.” Flamingo e.V.
  Official homepage
• Humboldt Forum. “Dara Tûyê – درخت توت – The Mulberry Tree: Feminist Voices on War and Gardens.” Humboldt Forum, 29 Nov. 2025–30 Aug. 2027.
  Official exhibition page
• Land Berlin, Commissioner for Participation, Integration and Migration. “Bund stoppt Zugang zu Integrationskursen: 8.000 Kursplätze weniger in Berlin.” 13 Feb. 2026.
  Official statement
• United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. “Information on Syria.” UNHCR Germany, 10 Aug. 2026.
  UNHCR guidance
• Germany. Aufenthaltsgesetz [Residence Act], §104(14). Federal Ministry of Justice.
  Official statutory text

What stood out to me across these readings was how much depends on the word “remigration” and how differently it gets defined. The InfoMigrants explainer covers the AfD’s migration positions going into the February 2025 election, when delegates voted the term into the federal program. Officially it means deporting people with no right to stay, removing criminals, and sending refugees back once the reason they fled is gone, with Syrians given as the example. That reminded me of the Syrian doctors from our earlier reading, since it is the same argument about going home after Assad, now written into a party program. By the CNN piece in April 2026, the Saxony-Anhalt branch had built its manifesto around the word and extended it to Ukrainian refugees, and Ulrich Siegmund was telling delegates in Magdeburg, “We say yes to consistent deportations.” More and more I see similarities between this far-right movement in Germany and that of the MAGA movement in the US. I even recently saw a video interviewing AfD supporters at a rally in which multiple were donning MAGA paraphernalia.

The Courthouse News article was the most interesting to read in hindsight. Cain Burdeau describes the week in January 2025 when Friedrich Merz passed a non-binding migration motion with AfD votes and then lost the binding bill 350 to 338, after at least 12 members of his own party didn’t vote for it. The headline says the firewall held, though one of the political scientists he quotes says it fell. I found Benjamin Höhne’s point the most convincing, which is that dismantling the firewall ends up legitimizing the AfD’s positions on migration. On September 6 the AfD won 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt and 39 of 83 seats, three short of a majority. In Burdeau’s article the firewall is about whose votes Merz would accept, and in Magdeburg it is now what keeps the largest party in the state out of government.

The Economist piece complicated that picture for me. It starts in Gelsenkirchen, where the AfD took about 30 percent of the council vote in September 2025. But it argues that the AfD did slightly worse across North Rhine-Westphalia than in the federal election, that the party is much weaker in wealthier, graduate-heavy cities like Cologne and Münster, and that strong AfD results tend to mobilize its opponents. It predicted the party would lose its mayoral runoffs, and it lost all three. I think the argument still holds, because two weeks after Saxony-Anhalt, Berlin put Die Linke first with 25.7 percent.

I think this matters most for our trip to Berline. I expect people in Berlin to describe the city as the opposite of Saxony-Anhalt, and my nightlife story is partly a way of testing that, since Arab and Turkish men report being turned away at club doors regardless of who wins elections. I also noticed that Burdeau quotes politicians and two political scientists but nobody the bill would have applied to. I’d want to hear from someone with a migration background in Magdeburg about how the firewall looks from there.

The idea I’ve had since the start of the semester is Muslim Berliners and the city’s nightlife. Through the few weeks we have had together, the topic of migrants and navigating LGBTQ+ identities’ and spaces has been quite. Particularly as I think about this in the context of Berlin, the city is known as maintaining a strong queer community especially in its nightlife. Recent news gives multiple examples of evidence I can explore. For example, in July a van was driven into a crowd at the edge of the Pride parade, killing one woman and injuring 31, and the Interior Minister called it an Islamist attack. The parade’s organizers warned against using it to stir up hatred of Muslims, which tells me they expected that. Two days later Güner Balcı, the  integration officer of Berlin’s SE Neukölln borough, said on the radio that the district has had a massive problem with anti-gay attacks for years. So I can see how a club would say it is protecting the people inside, and how that could end up looking the same as profiling to the person in line. I want to know if anything changed at the door of these historically exclusive places pre and post migration waves of demographics that are not allowed to be openly gay, especially for queer Muslims and for Arab and Turkish men who were already getting turned away.

A bouncer’s decision doesn’t leave a record, so I’d probably have to stand in lines and talk to people. I grew up in New York and have some sense of how doors work, but I don’t know how to read one in Berlin yet. I’d start by contacting DJ Ipek, who founded Gayhane, a monthly queer Turkish and Arabic night that has run at SO36 in Kreuzberg since 1997, because the people around it would know both sides of this. I also plan to contact the Club Commission and ADNB, the Turkish Federation’s anti-discrimination network, which takes complaints about club doors and has used test visits to document discrimination.

My second idea is Turkish Berliners and the election. Die Linke won on September 20 with 25.7 percent, and its lead candidate, Elif Eralp, is the daughter of Turkish immigrants. If she finds coalition partners she would be the first head of Berlin’s government with a migration background. Her party has invited the Greens and SPD into exploratory talks, but the SPD is divided and the CDU could still govern with those same two parties. A Turkish broadcaster covered the result as a win for the Turkish-origin candidate, but post-election polling found that housing and social security drove the vote. I’d like to ask people in Kreuzberg or Wedding which of those it was for them, and whether it would matter to them if she ends up in opposition anyway. I’m especially interested in older guest workers who have lived there for decades and still can’t vote. The recruitment agreement with Turkey turns 65 on October 30, which could be a way into those conversations. Berlin also naturalized about 39,000 people last year, around 4,100 of them Turkish citizens, so there are first-time voters to find too.

I’m still most attached to the nightlife story, but it’s also the harder one to get people on the record for and the time commitment is a little different than a normal article’s reporting, so I want the election idea ready in case it doesn’t come together once we’re there.

Ever since learning about deaf culture in Noah Buchholz’s class, a survey of American Sign Language, I have been interested in learning even more about deaf culture. From that class, I have learned that the strength of the deaf community is a force to be reckoned with. The concept of developing such a tight knit community among discrimination, hate, and othering is very empowering to me. The deaf community is also unique in that deaf culture is rarely shared within the nuclear family. Only 5-10% of deaf children have deaf parents, meaning deaf children are a part of this strong community that their parents and siblings are likely not a part of. Additionally, although deaf culture is different in different regions, deaf people across borders can still immediately connect over shared experiences such as trouble communicating with the hearing community, discrimination, misunderstanding, etc. The only other group I can think of with similar attributes is the LGBTQ community, where LGBTQ kids are often the only members of their family who are queer and develop queer culture. 

There is an association in Berlin called Deaf Refugees Berlin, which I would like to do a feature piece on. I have already been in contact with someone who works at the company, who is waiting to hear back from her supervisor for permission to proceed and begin answering some of my questions. I also reached out to my ASL professor to see if he has any contacts with the deaf community in Berlin. He referred me to another Princeton professor who does have contacts in Berlin, but hasn’t been responsive to any of my emails.

There have been previous reporting on Ukrainian deaf refugees, as in 2022, the German government told deaf refugees from Ukraine that they need to relocate out of Berlin, away from each other, and away from supporting sign language interpreters. They were originally told to relocate because at the time, the government had a program to relocate refugees to other cities to avoid overcrowding Berlin. However, Berlin is a hub for deaf culture, with deaf schools, deaf sports programs for kids, etc, which a lot of other cities in Germany do not have. The German government eventually let the deaf people stay in Berlin. 

InfoMigrants also created a short video (2 minutes), in 2024 highlighting Abbas Bazzi, who volunteers to teach refugees German Sign Language in Dresden Germany. They titled the short video, Double Language Barrier, and focused on the community that the lessons fostered, as well as explaining how the group helps form community. 

The biggest issue will be the communication barrier since I do not know German or ASL, but I have been communicating with the community through written German so far, which can be a work-around to that issue. However, I hope to report on the experiences of deaf refugees in Berlin, and shed light on the very unique space that Deaf Refugees Berlin holds. This can help reveal insight on the lives of a refugee group that is underrepresented in the media.

Willkommensklassen (welcome classes) are branches of the Nelson Mandela School in Wilmersdorf for newly arrived refugee children and young people, aged 6 to 18, to learn the necessary German language skills to progress into the public school system. In Berlin, two standalone educational centres for “welcome classes” currently operate at eight refugee arrival centres, including Tempelhof and Tegel. Meant as a “pass-over”, the attendance at welcome classes should “generally last no longer than one year”. The reality is much different. Children and young people are still attending schools at emergency shelters and arrival centres even when they have stopped being housed there.

The Left Party has consistently denounced the “segregation” of refugee children from regular school systems. It is not hard to see where this worry stems from: the Senate Department for Education indicated that in June, 137 children attended an education centre in Tegel. Only 13 school-age children were housed in the emergency shelter.

Now, as the Senate plans to build a new centre at the Hasensheide refugee accommodation centre, the conversation is gaining momentum. The center will welcome 900 people, including many unaccompanied minors, 75 of whom will have a place at the “welcome classes.”

Back in February, the district assembly of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg had already stipulated that children should enter schools in Kreuzberg and Neukölln. The Senate argues otherwise: “Individual calculated excess capacity in North Neukölln is insufficient to ensure the reliable and permanent accommodation of all children.”

The Left Party has not been the only one to denounce the continuous operation of these school centres; the Berlin Refugee Council makes a similar denunciation: “The Senate is clinging to an expensive, discriminatory, and segregating parallel system, even though the conditions on which it was originally justified have long since ceased to exist”. The continuous operation of these centres could also, in principle, violate the recently adopted Common European Asylum System. In particular, under Article 16, member states must grant “the same access to education as their own nationals and under similar conditions.”

Then, how to speak of integration?

I want to report on how the educational experiences of children in these centres differ from those of refugee children in public schools. I am also interested in exploring meaningful ways in which children can be integrated into German society.

Children as “voices aware of their vocality”

In Silencing the Past, anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us: “While some of us debate what history is or was, others take it in their own hands”. The making (and unmaking) of history is characterised by silences: marginalised voices are inherently forgotten because power structures dictate what is remembered, who makes it, and how we interpret memory. Despite severely suffering due to conflict, children are often sidelined in policymaking practices that affect them (Martuscelli & Villa, 2018). But I think their role as peacebuilders and agents in the construction of collective memory is crucial. Art therapy practices are particularly interesting because, in being co-creators of a learning space, children reclaim ownership of their experiences of trauma (Trouillot, 2015).

A Child’s Laugh is Worth All the Money in the World!

Currently, several child rights organisations operate educational programmes for refugee children.Clown4All, launched in Berlin with cooperation from the European Solidarity Corps, regularly performs in refugee shelters, open-stage ‘Clown Jams’, and training sessions. Clowns Without Borders also operates a chapter in Germany. I am working to get in touch with them and, hopefully, understand how their work helps manage their transition into schooling.