On a gray Tuesday evening in Berlin’s Neukölln district, the living room of the Blue House was filled with a cozy light and the murmur of diverse people. A dozen people gather around a long table: refugees, volunteers, and students practicing English. Sam Alabiad smiled engagingly at everyone around him.
He was excited to share his story after I introduced myself and told him I was a student journalist. His expressions did not betray the challenges he’d faced, which I’d come to learn as the night progressed.
When Sam arrived in Berlin in 2017, he was thirty years old, trained in linguistics, and already twice displaced. In 2016, he had fled Syria for Turkey, hoping to find safety and academic work. “It was unstable,” he recalled. “After the coup attempt, we were always worried, are they going to deport us?” He’s referring to the 2016 failed coup attempt against Erdogan and the crackdown on civilians that ensued. A friend in Germany told him to try for a research visa. “I didn’t want to cross the sea. I didn’t want to risk it,” he said, about those fleeing to Greece in flimsy rafts. So he found a short-term research post in Arabic linguistics, packed his degree, and flew to Berlin.
The visa lasted six months. After it expired, Turkey’s laws forbade him from returning for five years. “I was stuck,” he said simply. “So I applied for asylum.”
What followed was not a single moment of arrival, but a slow, grinding negotiation with bureaucracy. Germany’s asylum process can take months or years; in Sam’s case, it took eight. He learned that even refugees with degrees and language skills face systemic barriers: recredentialing requirements, certification processes, and waiting lists. “If you want to teach in Germany,” he said, “you must teach two subjects. I could teach English, but not only English. They told me, ‘You need to do another bachelor’s degree.’ Another three years of study. I thought; Why?”
When I spoke to Philipp Jaschke, a policy researcher at Germany’s Institute for Employment Research, he nodded knowingly at Sam’s story. “And it’s often hard for, especially for refugees, but generally for migrants, because Germany is, I would say it’s unique with this vocational education system. If people apply, often they get a decision and then okay, ‘we approve part of your qualification.’”
“And so they tell you you need to prove practice in this and that and that and that and you need to go to school to learn in theory this and this and this. So it’s super complicated.”
In other words, integration in Germany isn’t only about learning the language; it’s about navigating institutional bureaucracy. “Everything here is on paper,” Sam said. “Letters, letters, letters. If you don’t know the language, you can’t survive the bureaucracy.” He relied on friends to translate documents and accompany him to offices, each visit another performance of legitimacy: am I educated enough, fluent enough, deserving enough to settle here?
He spent three years studying German intensively. “From zero to C1,” he said, shaking his head, referring to the European grade system for languages. “Three years of my life were just that.” When the pandemic hit, Berlin shut down. Classes went online; language schools closed; temporary teaching gigs vanished. “Two years without a job,” he said. “I was just at home.”
Finally, after six years of uncertainty, Sam found a stable position teaching English at a private school. “Now, when I apply for a job,” he said, smiling faintly, “they actually call me for an interview.”
For many in Berlin’s refugee community, the harder struggle comes not in the classroom but at home; literally. Housing in Berlin is a battle, even for Germans. For immigrants, it’s worse. “I spent two years searching for a flat,” Sam said. “Every day, every night. You apply, you go to viewings, you bring all your papers.” At open houses, he’d line up with dozens of others, clutching a folder: passport, residence permit, bank statements, a government letter guaranteeing rent payments. “And still,” he said, “they see ‘job center’ on the paper and say, ‘They won’t give you the flat.’”
Berlin’s rental market has become so competitive that underground brokers offer “black market” placements: sometimes more than €5,000. “I know people who paid under the table just to get a flat,” Sam said. “The government knows it exists. But what can they do? People are desperate.”
He eventually found his first real apartment thanks to a German friend’s mother, who vouched for him in person. “She told the landlord, ‘If he doesn’t pay, I will,’” Sam said. “That’s how I got the flat.”
The loneliness was harder to solve. “People say Berlin is open, multicultural,” Sam said. “That’s true: but only if you’re a party person. If you like bars, nightclubs, you’ll find people. I’m not that person.” For him, community meant the language cafés, the Sunday meetups, the Blue House, where volunteers and refugees trade words and stories. “This is my social life,” he said. “German people are not very open. Even your neighbors; you don’t know them. They live in their own bubbles.”
He laughed softly. “In England, they say people are cold. But the Germans are another level. To grab a coffee with a friend, you must schedule one month in advance.”
Today, Sam’s life is stable on paper: full-time job, apartment, friends, legal status. But stability, he said, isn’t the same as ease. The journey to Berlin was just the start of a years-long fight to truly take root and feel at home in Berlin. In the Blue House, where volunteers and newcomers trade stories in slow English, he finds a gome. Here, no one asks for papers. They ask where you’re from, what brought you here, and how you’re doing this week. People arrive from everywhere, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria, Turkey, and learn to make the city livable together.
