New models of the “Good refugee” – bureaucratic expectations of Syrian refugees in Germany

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since 2005, German immigration law required all refugees receiving social welfare benefits to undergo language and civic knowledge tests as a pathway to the labour markets. The German integration regime, which was grounded in social imaginaries, legislative initiatives and supranational agreements, produced bureaucratic and ideological challenges following the “long summer of migration”. Syrian asylum seekers entering Germany navigated shifts in the social imaginary and legal changes that both narrowed the definitions of a “good refugee” and expanded the benefits given to a select group of asylum seekers and refugees. I apply ethnographic fieldwork beginning on the Turkish border with Syria in 2015 and later fieldwork across Germany to analyse shifting social landscapes. The prerequisites of integration made long-term residency permits and citizenship contingent on “good integration”. The public recognition of “good” or “deserving” refugees was thus conditional on the fulfilment of a universal criteria of achievement in social competences.