This special issue project was conceived at a time when Germany has prominently come to the fore during the “summer of migration” in 2015 assuming a leading role in European asylum reception system. The German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) registered more than one million asylum applications in 2015 and 2016 (BAMF, 2019:5) when Dublin regulations were temporarily lifted to enable the arrival of mostly Syrian forced migrants fleeing the civil war and the oppression of the Assad regime. In a cruel twist of fate, at the time of the writing of this introduction, Germany undergoes a similar process of reception of forced migrants from Ukraine seeking shelter/protection away from the Russian aggression. While the legal framework put in place differs widely, lessons that can be drawn from the “summer of migration” remain crucial to tackle the current situation. This requires obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the arrivals in 2015 and thereafter. This special issue aims to contribute to the growing body of scholarship by reading the situation of post-2015 refugees through the lens of exclusion that is conceived as interlocking and co-existing with processes of inclusion. The approach taken here relies chiefly on the broader framework developed within the context of a large project funded by the Max Planck Societyi (see Foblets et al., 2018; Foblets & Yanaşmayan, 2022; Hruschka & Schader, 2020). Building on the concept of “differential inclusion” (Baban et al., 2017; De Genova et al., 2014) that describes how inclusion can be subject to varying degrees of “subordination, discrimination and segmentation”, the proposition of this special issue is to expand the focus on how different acts of exclusion, not limited to the topographical bordering practices and governance tools, by state as well as non-state actors can hinder access to the territory, to rights claims as well as to needed resources in different areas and ultimately prevent full participation. Significantly, this lens of exclusion intrinsically encompasses an attention to migrants' practices of resistance and solidarity, which further posits exclusion as ambiguous, temporally bounded and sphere-dependent. In order to document the variety of acts of and resistance against exclusion, the special issue brings together a multidisciplinary team of scholars in the fields of geography, anthropology, law, urban studies, sociology and political science, all working with original empirical data, collected in interviews, observations, surveys, laws and policy documents. This special issue sheds light on this historical critical juncture in European migration history that had become quintessentially associated with a “crisis” rhetoric (Crawley & Skleparis, 2018; Triandafyllidou, 2017) that produced highly volatile and shifting representations of migrants (Holzberg et al., 2018; Vollmer & Karakayali, 2018). Against the background of this prevailing “crisis” discourse, the contributions of this special issue tease out three essential topics that remain relevant for the refugee reception at large: (1) legal (un)certainty, (2) accommodation and housing and (3) societal responses. Critical scholarship has been questioning the distinction between “refugees” and “migrants” that neatly categorizes people on the move and regulates their movements and claims through different rights regime, policy and deservingness frames (Chauvin & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2014; Long, 2013; Zetter, 2007). This has become particularly crystallized in the European policy debates during the summer of 2015 and the ensuing “crisis” rhetoric which has substantially upheld and reproduced the oversimplified dichotomy between migrants and refugees (Crawley & Skleparis, 2018). In Germany, the distinction is also inscribed in a clear doctrinal separation of asylum and immigration as legal claims (Vetters, 2022). Yet the legal certainty in theory often fails to turn into reality. Recent literature focusing on the rights claims of post-2015 refugees has revealed the discriminatory and discretionary bureaucratic practices in the processes of asylum determination (Schittenhelm & Schneider, 2017; Schneider et al., 2020) as well as the shadow of suspicion that reigns over the assessments (Borelli & Wyss, 2022) that ultimately render these decisions illegible to migrants. These bureaucratic encounters are afflicted by the strict distinction, and the “changing of tracks” remains an anomaly in the German context, even though exceptions happen in specific hardship cases (Härtefallkommission) and at times in the least expected spaces such as administrative courts (see Vetters, 2022 on the latter). In this special issue, Hruschka and Rohmann (2022) show that the principle of legal certainty has been further crippled by a frenzy of legislative and policy changes. In their contribution, they not only trace how legal ambiguity is being effectively produced by the fragmentation created through the “legislative hyperactivity”, but they also demonstrate how inclusionary (i.e., integration support) measures are being abandoned in favour of exclusionary acts (i.e., securitization measures) or being made dependent on new legal discriminatory concepts such as the so-called prospect of staying (Bleibeperspektive). Asylum seekers coming from countries that have a protection quota over 50% are considered to have a good prospect of staying, which currently includes Eritrea, Syria, Somalia and very recently Afghanistan.ii They are accordingly offered certain privileges such as free access to integration courses, possibility of obtaining work permit after three months, etc. The prospect of stay has created a within-status precarity in the German legal system and has been also criticized for not complying with liberal principles (Schultz, 2020). As Hruschka and Rohmann (2022) argue, a further fragmentation to the system occurred through the changes made to the issuance of toleration of stay (Duldung) that is granted to people who are obliged to leave the country but whose deportation is suspended for legal or factual reasons (see Schütze, 2022 for a historical overview). The proliferation of different grounds has made the system ever more complex and did not resolve the issue of long-term legal precarity. The government recently announced that more than half of the tolerated foreigners (approximately 250 thousand persons) has been in that situation for at least five years.iii Scholarship began attending to the repercussions of legal precarity on forced migrants through ethnographic approaches. Focusing on the specific type of toleration given for vocational training purposes (Ausbildungsduldung) Drangsland (2020) and Fontanari (2022) display how it can be mobilized as a bordering tool to produce skilled workers and extend neoliberal deservingness to forced migrants. Suerbaum (2021) in this special issue picks up on the deservingness claims of the unaccompanied minors and brings it into the conversation with another time-bound legal protection mechanism, that is, temporary suspension of deportation based on pregnancy (Schwangerschaftsduldung). Her contribution, based on long-term ethnographic research in Berlin, unveils how a migrant's body is central to the legal status determination in Germany, at times a successful claim of deservingness but unceasingly a bearer of legal precarity and racialization. A significant area of reception of asylum seekers which requires concrete action is the provision of accommodation. Upon arrival in Germany, asylum seekers are typically placed in reception centres before being relocated to regional states (Länder) and municipalities, which generally offer collective and centralized accommodation, often subcontracted to welfare associations. The redistribution follows a dispersal scheme, which is calculated on the basis of population size and tax revenues (Königsteiner Schlüssel). While it is less common to have large-scale camp structures in Germany that offer shelter to thousands of refugees, scholars have pointed to the “campization” (Kreichauf, 2018) of the accommodation centres to draw attention to their isolated and permanently temporary nature. Recent scholarship on post-2015 refugees' reception conditions through different case studies have attended to the “the situated materiality” of the reception centres, that is to say to their interaction with the surrounding infrastructure (Nettelbladt & Boano, 2019), practices of bordering and debordering that are reproduced by volunteers (Blank, 2021) as well as the resistance and home-making of refugees (Steigemann & Misselwitz, 2020). In this special issue, comparing three accommodation centres in the same city, Seethaler-Wari and Yanaşmayan (2023) seek to reveal intersecting forms of socio-spatial exclusion by analysing differing internal and external spatial arrangements as well as the regulation of space and social relations between forced migrants and social workers and volunteers inside the accommodation centres. These ambivalent social relations intersect and reproduce the dominant notions of the gendered refugee label that differentially rewards social behaviours and control refugee bodies. Yet forced migrants seek to maintain ownership over the space in and around the centres to meet their need for a sense of “normalcy”. Scholars in different contexts have shown the longer-term consequences of the exclusion produced in the accommodation centres, particularly through the dispersal policies (Lumley-Sapanski, 2022; Tazzioli, 2020). Germany also extended its allocation policy to the post-arrival context, that is beyond the accommodation centres, through the residence obligation (Wohnsitzauflage). This means that even when forced migrants are recognized as refugees, they have to stay three years within the bounds of the federal states or even of the municipalities that they are allocated to, if they are reliant on social welfare. Scholarship has demonstrated that the transition from accommodation centres to housing is far from smooth due to competitiveness of the already-strained housing markets, discrimination (Adam et al., 2021) and more broadly internal/local border regimes in place (El-Kayed & Hamann, 2018; Schneider, 2022). It also underlines the significance of networks in overcoming these disadvantages (Adam et al. 2021). While most studies focus on the city contexts, recent literature has also spotlighted the particular hardship of the residence obligation for refugees initially assigned to rural areas as well as the potential of rural areas for integration (Mehl et al., 2023; Schneider, 2022). In this special issue, Weidinger and Kordel (2020) contributes to the literature through a long-term empirical study combining surveys, individual, expert and household interviews in two rural areas in Bavaria. By extending the “housing pathways” approach, previously applied in city contexts, to rural areas, they analyse subjective residential preferences over time, structural mechanisms leading to exclusion as well as strategies to overcome these. In line with the literature, they highlight not only the role of personal networks but also the role of intermediaries and local leadership. At the wake of the summer of 2015, Germany was largely praised for welcoming forced migrants. The so-called “culture of welcome” (Willkommenskultur) was embodied in huge numbers of volunteers setting up short-term accommodation, collecting donations, distributing clothes and food, teaching German, assisting in dealing with the bureaucracy, etc. This large wave of solidarity has found resonance in the literature that has not only sought to understand the scale but also the (political) motives of the pro-refugee support (Drouhot et al., 2023; Fleischmann & Steinhilper, 2017; Karakayali, 2017; Karakayali & Kleist, 2016; Kausmann et al., 2022). Research has shown the contested nature of the voluntary movements that engage inadvertently in both debordering and rebordering practices (Fleischmann, 2019; Togral Koca, 2019). Moreover, studies focusing on the general population, namely on citizens who have not necessarily actively engaged in refugee support, have sought to understand the impact of the increase in refugee migration in 2015 on the attitudes towards migration or in other words the prevalence and the sustainability of the “culture of welcome”. Studies in both German (Meidert & Rapp, 2019) and other European contexts (De Coninck, 2019) have revealed that there is a hierarchy of deservingness to the “culture of welcome” that distinguishes among different categories of migrants. Cross-country comparisons have demonstrated the differential impact of the summer of migration on public attitudes as well as on the politicization of migration. Germany seems to have maintained moderate levels of acceptance towards migration (Messing & Sávágari, 2019) even if the politicization has drastically increased (Hutter & Hanspeter, 2022) to the extent that it was often described as a catalyst for the rise of the extreme right party AfD. Most recently, Drouhot et al. (2023:2) have showcased the widespread support for refugees and diversity at large among the urban German population and challenged the contention that “culture of welcome” was a momentary phenomenon. In this special issue, the contributions from Lems (2022) and Hoehne and Scharrer (2021) explore societal responses to Germany's “culture of welcome” in unexpected ways. Lems (2022) focuses on the neighbouring Austria and traces the effects of Germany's short-lived open-door policy that initially triggered a sea of solidarity with refugees but quickly turned into a backlash and “a winning streak for racist and nationalist political parties” (2022: 2) in Europe at large (see also Pries', 2021 take on this). She draws attention to the specific role Austrian politicians played in the normalization of anti-immigration discourses across Europe and in fostering what she calls a “culture of unwelcome”. Based on ethnographic research in a mountain region, where right wing support is high, she displays how the cultures of unwelcome are rooted in genealogies of anti-cosmopolitan practices that draw on local, national and transnational repertoires. Similarly, Hoehne and Scharrer (2021) pick up on the co-existence of cultures of welcome and unwelcome to use Lems's terminology that prompt “balancing acts of inclusion and exclusion” from the part of migrant communities. Their contribution based on in-depth interviews with Somali migrants who have arrived around 2015 and earlier is in and of itself a critique of the limited attention span of public discourses that predominantly focused on recent arrivals of Syrians. Hoehne and Scharrer (2021) analyse four different fields of social interaction, namely within Somali networks, with German “majority” society, with German bureaucracy and with other migrant communities, and underline that in all of these spaces, perhaps with the exception of bureaucratic encounters, opportunities for “sociabilities” (Glick Schiller & Caglar, 2016) despite ongoing exclusion have been created. Significantly, their contribution also highlights how the prevailing “culture of welcome” facilitates some of these interactions and how migrant communities in the past suffered from lack of support. Yet, they also underline that after 2015, Somali communities have become hypervisible and more susceptible to racism, once again a sign of co-existence of exclusion and inclusion. To come back to the question asked in the title, this special issue, on the whole, displays that experiences of both welcome and exclusion have marked the lives of the refugees in post-2015 Germany. While the jury is still out on whether or not the “culture of welcome” has dissolved into thin air, the current situation with the war in Ukraine that has so far displaced more than eight million people, function as a natural laboratory to observe this. In this section, I offer a short reflection on the three challenges raised in this special issue. Legal uncertainty: As opposed to the gigantic failure of solidarity that the European Union showed during the summer of migration in 2015, the EU was quick to materialize a common response to the displacement of millions of Ukrainians and first time ever triggered the EU Temporary Protection Directive,iv which provided immediate access to social benefits and labour market. Five million refugees from Ukraine have found protection in Europe,v among which about one million are residing in Germany. Albeit temporary, the harmonized legal status granted to refugees from Ukraine allowed a smooth transition to the reception context and overcame the legal uncertainty caused by waiting times associated with the asylum procedure. A nationwide representative study on refugees in Germany (the IAB-SOEP-BAMF surveyvi) that was initially established following 2015 movements and is now extended to Ukrainian refugees (IAB-BiB/FReDA-BAMF-SOEP survey) display that 94 per cent of Ukrainian refugees received a residence title after two months of arrival (Brücker et al., 2023: 51). Moreover, they have been spared the Dublin procedure, which has also generated legal uncertainty for the so-called “secondary movements” of post-2015 refugees. Therefore, the flexibility introduced to the system through the EU-wide temporary protection status has helped alleviate the legal precarity produced by the German/European asylum system. It nevertheless came with its very own demeanour: the peril of fostering a two-tier asylum system. Not only that the application of the Directive was very limited towards the third state nationals fleeing Ukraine but also that the reason why it was not activated before has led to existential reproaches on unequal solidarity (see Ineli-Ciger, 2023 specifically on this and the whole volume by Carrera & Ineli-Ciger, 2023 for very comprehensive analyses of the Directive). Decisions must now also be made on the further steps to be taken for refugees from Ukraine after the expiration of the Directive, which could fall back on the national asylum systems that could yet again create backlog and legal limbo. Accommodation and housing: A distinctive feature of the forced migration from Ukraine has been the liberty to choose their destination both at the European and German level. Germany has the second highest number of registrations in absolute numbers, after Poland. A new study matching Gallup World Poll's indicators on migration aspirations with the current situation claims that if the EU were to accept a laissez-faire distribution, Germany might become the first country of destination (Elinder et al., 2022). Within Germany, forced migrants from Ukraine are not subjected to the dispersal policies following the Königsteiner Schlüssel. This means that they were mostly free to settle where they wanted, an exception being introduced in June 2022 for those dependent on social welfare. However, Brücker et al. (2023: 53) show that this was only the case for a small minority and over 70 per cent of the refugees from Ukraine were already living in private houses by June 2022. This can be explained with the flexibility of the system that allowed making maximum use of personal networks that the literature shows being an important factor as mentioned above. Additionally, this is also facilitated by the solidarity of the German population that among other types of engagement took the very concrete form of offering private accommodation. A survey that we conducted on hosts of private accommodation show that 20 per cent of the hosts could offer a separate apartment (Haller et al., 2022). This lends itself to the third challenge that I address here. Societal responses: While the provision of private accommodation is not a new phenomenon, our study displays that it has taken a new scale and has the potential to establish itself as a new form of engagement for forced migrants (Haller et al., 2022). A huge majority of the hosts surveyed has expressed interest in hosting again, and not only refugees from Ukraine but also from other conflict zones (ibid.). Nationwide representative surveys also display that support for reception of Ukrainian refugees is and remains very high over time (Dollmann et al., 2023). On concrete types of engagement, the survey from Höltmann et al. (2022) reveal that about one-third of the population donates financially or in kind, which they claim is similar to the situation in 2015 (Jacobsen et al., 2017) and about 4 per cent of the population hosts refugees at home. Looking at the willingness to support, Dollmann et al. (2023) report higher figures, even if slightly decreasing since the beginning of the war (see also Mayer et al., 2022). While the mismatch between willingness and action to support might imply an untapped potential, the overall support towards the reception of forced migrants from Ukraine is proof enough that the “culture of welcome” is alive and kicking at the societal level. This brief overview of the recent refugee movements stresses the continuous significance of taking stock of the different episodes of forced migration to Germany. In the current political climate in Germany, where a progressive migration agenda has been put forward by the coalition government and shortage of skilled workers has become a household sentence, recognition of being an “immigration country” cannot disentangle itself from being a refugee-recipient country. Reception of refugees is and will remain a constitutive part of liberal democracies that cannot be reduced to a “crisis” response. Critically reflecting on the lessons learned and unlearned remains a crucial task in this undertaking. I am grateful to the Max Planck Society that supported this special issue within the framework of the research initiative “The Challenges of Migration, Integration and Exclusion” (WiMi). I would also like to sincerely thank the handling editor of the journal, Deniz Sert, for a very supportive and smooth processing of the special issue. I am also thankful to Ramona Rischke for her timely and constructive feedback and Lea Christinck for her research assistance. The peer review history for this article is available at https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway/wos/peer-review/10.1111/imig.13149. Not applicable.