The Foreign Minister of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier, sharply responded to his Russian colleague on “the case of a Russian-speaking girl Liza” who was kidnapped and raped by migrants, according to her relatives. He accused Sergey Lavrov of interference in the internal affairs of Germany, DW reported. There is no justifying the use of the case “for political propaganda and interference in a complicated enough internal German discussion on migrants and stirring it up,” Frank-Walter Steinmeier said. He was responding to a statement by Lavrov, who criticized the German authorities for attempts “to correctively make reality shiny for internal political goals.” At the same time, the Russian Foreign Minister expressed hope that Germany would manage to overcome the crisis caused by the influx of migrants “without serious losses.” According to Frontex, about 1.2 million migrants arrived in the EU in the first 10 months of 2015.
Natalia Toganova, Senior Researcher of the IMEMO of the Russian Academy of Science, thinks that in the world today, millions of people are fleeing not because their rights are being infringed by a state, but because there is no state: “And it is a completely new situation for the developed countries, where these flows of refugees have rushed to. It is difficult to draw a line there, which of them is a refugee. The journey to Europe is quite expensive. These people are not from the lower layers of society, but wealthy. At least, they had the money to travel. There is no legislation for the integration of these people. There are checks into each individual case, whether there was an infringement of rights or not. And this system does not work now. Both the European Union and Germany face the task of adapting to the new situation, of adapting the legislation,” Toganova says.
According to her, a significant portion of migrants are men, who do not work, and this is a social issue: “An obstacle to integration is the legislation and the checking into the facts of whether their situations correspond to the status of a political refugee. And technically it's very difficult to check this. That is why there are social problems.”
Toganova thinks that another problem is the issue of deportation of people: “Despite the increase in the number of those deported from Germany over the last few months, still, compared with those who arrived, we are talking about thousands. Perhaps there will be some acceleration in this direction, but it is difficult to imagine that the European Union will be able to recognize the several hundreds of thousands of migrants who do not fit the legislation in the following year, and deport them. That is why there is a question of how the integration policy and immigration policy will change, on granting the right to work, on social inclusion, in other words, the involvement of migrants in public life, their resettlement in ordinary districts, neighborhoods, so that they would live independently, and not in specially designated buildings, houses or apartments. This issue has no clear answer yet.”
