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Andreas Kossert on refugees and the right to asylum: "You look down on the new ones"

2020-10-28T00:05:53.341Z


What refugees have experienced and lost is beyond the imagination of the people who take them in. Bestselling author Andreas Kossert says how integration can still succeed.


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Refugees arrive in an emergency shelter in Lower Saxony in 2015

Photo: Peer Körner / dpa

SPIEGEL:

Mr. Kossert, refugees are considered troublemakers - always and everywhere, you write in your new book.

How do you come to this assessment?

Andreas Kossert: A

look at history shows that.

Historically and currently, refugees are almost exclusively perceived as a threat.

They trigger new fears and struggles for distribution and, in their unhousedness, remind us that our own familiar life could also be blown up at any time by war and other catastrophes.

Nobody likes to think about that.

Some people simply lack the imagination of what it means to lose everything.

So far, every sedentary society has tried to take in as few refugees as possible.

SPIEGEL:

Which countries are you thinking of?

Kossert:

When millions of Greeks were expelled from what is now Turkey in the early 1920s, compatriots insulted them upon arrival.

When the representatives of 32 countries and dozens of aid organizations met in Evian in 1938 to discuss who would be ready to take in Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, only the ambassadors of the Dominican Republic agreed to take in other people who were in distress.

The 14 million refugees and displaced persons who came to the occupation zones of the remaining Germany after the Second World War were by no means welcome. 

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Source: spiegel

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