For an industrial hub like Baden-Württemberg — home to auto majors Porsche and Mercedes and multinational corporations like Bosch, SAP and BASF — the approach makes sense, says Gari Pavkovic, head of the Department for Integration Policy of Stuttgart. Aging Germany has an estimated shortage of more than a million skilled workers.
These integration moves also coincided with another trend that runs counter to what’s happening elsewhere. While the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is rapidly gaining support in several states, from Brandenburg and Saxony to Thuringia, in Baden-Württemberg its popularity is declining. A September poll shows support for the anti-immigrant AfD at 12 percent, down from 15 percent in 2016. As mainstream parties in Germany and beyond struggle to stop the surge of the far-right, Baden-Württemberg is showing that the answer to bridging a divide between migrants and locals might lie not just in politics, but in economics. [...]
With Germany as a whole accepting far fewer refugees than it did in 2015, the numbers entering Baden-Württemberg have declined too. Still, in 2018, the state the size of Maryland accepted 11,000 migrants, mostly from Nigeria, Syria and Turkey — the U.S. plans to admit 18,000 in all, in 2020. Twenty percent of the population has a migrant background in Baden-Württemberg, located in the southwest of the country. In Stuttgart, it’s 50 percent. In comparison, Thuringia in the east counts just over 7 percent of its population as foreign-born. [...]
Deutsche Bahn too will only take trainees with sufficient language skills who have passed a psychological test and possess technical knowledge. They need to prove they graduated from a recognized school. For refugees fleeing a war, these can be tough hurdles. That’s where organizations like Caritas — which also helps refugees navigate bureaucracy, from getting educational qualifications recognized to obtaining a driving license — come in. “There are no limits,” says Lisa Maisch, a team leader of one home that houses 146 people. “We connect them or help them figure out ways to do that.”
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