Immigrants with no future
June 8, 2009
For the first time, the European Union agency for external border security, Frontex, is financing a group deportation of about 100 Vietnamese from Germany and Poland on Monday. The group is to be flown out on an Air Berlin flight from the Schoenefeld airport in the German capital.
For many of the Vietnamese, the trip home is the end of a long and difficult journey. Lured by the promises of smugglers, many of these would-be immigrants paid huge sums of money to get to Germany, only to submit an asylum application that in most cases was rejected.
Nevertheless, the number of new arrivals from Asian country is growing. And, not just in Germany, but also in neighboring Poland and the Czech Republic.
Asylum-seekers risk everything
In the Berlin neighborhood of Marzahn, the Vietnamese community is divided into two groups. There are the successful businessmen, standing behind the counters of their florist shops and fast food stands. Most of these men were formerly guest workers, who have fought for years for their modest life in Germany. When a police car cruises down their streets, they appear pleased: Here come their customers.
Along the edge of the parking lot, stand another group of Vietnamese men - and here it is a different story. They are selling black market cigarettes and the uniforms and flashing lights set them into a panic, as they make their perilous getaways across busy streets and subway tracks.
These illegal street vendors belong to a new generation of immigrants. Their chances for a future in Germany are slim, says Tamara Henschel, head of Reistrommel, an organization that seeks to help Vietnamese immigrants in Marzahn.
"After Vietnam opened up, but even after the fall of the Iron Curtain, many Vietnamese who had never been abroad came to Europe," she explained. "In principle, it would be better for us and we would welcome it if people would stay in their home countries. If they didn't undertake such risky journeys, which are sometimes very dangerous, put these people into debt and ruin their lives."
Most asylum applications rejected
With little money and no work permit, the new immigrants often turn to illegal trade as a last resort.
Refugee organizations are protesting the unusual deportation from Berlin's Schoenefeld Airport. The Berlin Refugee Council quotes a report from Amnesty International that warns against returning asylum seekers to Vietnam where there is "widespread torture, political detention and use of the death penalty."
The German government's human rights commissioner is also concerned.
"The human rights situation in Vietnam is absolutely unsatisfactory," Guenter Nooke told Deutsche Welle. "I believe that people who can expect persecution and imprisonment in Vietnam should not be deported."
But of the refugees that have come to Germany in the last few years, very few -- at least according to German public agencies and courts -- have reason to fear political reprisals back in Vietnam.
Vietnamese represent the third largest group of asylum applicants in Germany, after Iraqis and Turks, but according to Volker Piening, Berlin's integration commissioner, only few are recognized as cases of political persecution.
"The acceptance rate is roughly zero," he said. "That means that of this group of asylum-seekers, there is a very large group of people who no longer have a right of residence. This is why the Vietnamese share of deportations in recent months has been comparatively high."
About 85,000 Vietnamese live legally in Germany; the number of undocumented Vietnamese immigrants is unknown. Unlike this most recent wave of arrivals, the Vietnamese who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s succeeded in establishing a life for themselves. Those in West Germany were "Boat People" fleeing from the Communist regime; those in East Germany came as guest workers.
Their children are considered particularly ambitious and are accepted into Germany's college-prep high schools at rates higher than any other immigrant group, even higher than their German peers.
Bernd Graessler / hf
Editor: Kateri Jochum