Quotations of professionals

There is another problem that concerns the police headquarters […] an extremely serious barrier […] an applicant might have to wait months before being able to be among the 20 people allowed in to fill in the form [C3].
(NGO legal assistant, Italy)

It is a system that is extremely perverse: meaning that people are asked to integrate, but they are not given the opportunity to do so. [...] There is the phase where everything is blocked, when they have requested asylum, as if it was an illness, and the phase after, when anything is possible. But you have got too far behind. When you have waited two years and done nothing during these two years, you have not given the person the ability to do something.
(Reception centre manager, France)

The situation in Hellinikon, that was a big issue, with thousands of people living there without tents or toilets (there were five toilets for 2,000 people). I believe there was no planning at all for handling so many people. As a result, these people were crammed into camps where conditions were appalling.
(Social worker, Greece)

They place these people in smaller villages and earn money from housing them for a shorter period. And then they close down the accommodation centre and the Migration Agency decides to move them far away from there. In the worst case, a person can be taken out of school in the middle of the semester […]. This way of handling these young persons in this country is unprecedented in modern times.
(Teacher, Sweden)

You have a housing stock that cannot absorb all the flows, with the migration pressure that we have seen. And today we can have situations of people who unfortunately have not been accommodated at all throughout the procedure.
(Local housing authority expert, France)

I have contact with a boy on Facebook who has had his age re-registered. There was no possibility for the social services to offer him anything here, so he had to be moved to the asylum accommodation centre. He didn’t want to because he expressed a fear, like other boys, of winding up with adult men, whom they don’t know. […] They’re afraid of being molested – really, this is what they say. They don’t say it outright, but they say that they are afraid to sleep because someone might do something bad to them, and they don’t have a door to close behind them. So, this boy […] calls himself homeless, but he does have the possibility of living at the Migration Agency’s […] centre.
(NGO child expert, Sweden)

You have these fantastic examples that are really touching, take this small village around here. They lacked a permanent dentist at the public dental care for many years. Now they have a Syrian dentist who lives in [town]. Isn’t it beautiful?
(Local housing authority expert, Sweden)

I met this guy who was a pharmacist in Pakistan and who was helped by being included in this context, helping the town’s pharmacist, because he was like a local institution and he was 80 years old, so he could ensure continuity to this activity.
(Lawyer, Italy)

And I simply believe that the opportunities are best in a foster family. It constitutes an […] intimate setting, personal involvement, personal attachment, personal assumption of responsibility for the individual, and where people take care of everyday problems, challenges, all the paperwork, and simply where someone is around day and night.
(Guardian, Germany)

Well, [Gothenburg] received more asylum applicants. They lived here and then they were thrown out of Gothenburg and were placed at different adult asylum accommodation centres all over the region. However, they return to Gothenburg and hang out, because this is the place where they lived. They have their friends there. They have their social context, but they have no accommodation. So they live with friends, or they even live outdoors, or they hang out in Nordstan [a big shopping mall in the city of Gothenburg].
(Law enforcement expert, Sweden)

Young people who have been supported, who have gone to school and reached the age of 18, and who overnight are no longer supported by the ASE [aide sociale à l’enfance, child welfare services], and find themselves in the street. But they are still in school. So that poses a problem obviously to everyone: to them, of course; and to the institutions that support them, because they have homeless pupils.
(Law enforcement expert, Sweden)

There are individual cases when, for example, [...] they just haven’t re-registered [at their new address] yet. And then the Job Centre quickly suspends the benefits [...] or they have forgotten to submit the follow-up form for the further approval because the letter has not arrived. Then it could be that someone is destitute [...]
(Local social welfare authority, Germany)

And here’s the irrational thing: once you are legally recognised as having all rights, in practice you lose all your rights. […] Immediately upon recognition as refugees, they lose every right they had before and they enter into a ‘grey area’, where there are huge problems.
(Local social welfare authority expert, Greece)

What is sometimes an obstacle is when children have no identity documents. We have a case now, so pending the provision of civil status documents by Office Français de Protection des Réfugiés et Apatrides(OFPRA), the CAF necessarily requires the birth certificate for the child, and that’s what drags on, so, while waiting, access to family allowances cannot be opened up.
(Social worker, France)

It means nothing to the company. It means nothing, because the residence permit is much more reassuring. Companies are used to seeing them. Whereas they are not at all familiar with receipts. The fact that there are these renewals to be done every three months or six months, it depends, it’s not at all something that encourages the company to hire.
(Employment agency expert, France)

Every boy I know has trouble sleeping. Many of them have been to the healthcare centre and have been prescribed sleeping pills. Many of the boys have visited the social counsellors at school for support. Several of them have been referred to the Red Cross, which has been able to provide psychological assistance. Then we have a handful of children who have been admitted to the children’s psychiatry ward or the adult psychiatry wards repeatedly, because of various suicide attempts.
(NGO child expert and guardian, Sweden)

It’s rather obvious that people who are children one day and treated like adults the next day will not feel OK. The regulations are rigidly defined, so all changes enter into force from one day to the other. The persons have first been [staying] in a supported independent living accommodation and then they’re just supposed to stay in the Migration Agency’s accommodation centres for asylum applicants, where there is no support from adults whatsoever. […] The staff that is there is to a great extent guards from Securitas, who are there to maintain order. That’s not optimal at all. And because of this, we get a lot of signals from […] the sports associations, who work at the asylum accommodation centres. They say that the group of young men and boys, mainly from Afghanistan, suffer from severe mental health problems. They come from this safe environment and are thrown into a highly insecure environment.
(NGO integration expert, Sweden)

Their families are either in refugee camps or in conflict areas. They [the families] turn to the person that’s sitting here in safety: ‘You’re having it all, and we’re under all this suffering.’ […] It’s breaking these people down, psychologically breaking them down. They can’t cope. I think I could say that 90 % of those persons I’ve met in this situation have said: ‘I can’t focus. I can’t learn the language. I can’t go to school. I attend school just to get the introduction benefit, but I don’t understand what the teacher is saying.’ When we send them for work practice, they say that they can’t focus there. Employment works better, because they think that a job might be a way for them to bring their families here. […] Even socially, when we try to invite them to participate in cultural or social activities, to integrate in society, they say: ‘My family is in that situation and you want me to come to a cultural event?’
(NGO integration expert, Sweden)

The observation that we make is that, from the point of view of the people concerned, it’s a little discouraging […] to have overcome so many obstacles, to obtain refugee status and finally find themselves without prospects. There have been problems […] because people imagined that with the status finally they had the holy grail and they were going to have a normal life, and in fact it is only the beginning of a new nightmare.
(Local housing authority expert, France)

I think that OFPRA’s decision, in terms of recognition of refugee status or at least subsidiary protection, has the value of a legal decision, a ruling, a form of recognition.
(Guardian, France)

There is a lack of willingness when it comes to training workers operating in the field, which means that often basic rights are not guaranteed, starting with the general practitioners who refuse to write prescriptions for patients because they don’t have a fiscal code.
(Social worker, Italy)

There is a real lack of awareness on the part of social health workers and this should be tackled. It would be fundamental to have policies of this kind, because this is the real starting point […] another crucial aspect is that of providing sufficiently specialised training allowing professionals to recognise early risk signals for mental health problems.
(Psychiatrist, France)

What we can observe is that these guys very often attend school classes in the reception centres rather than in ordinary public schools and this is an approach that they do not deal with very well, because it is not a school, it is the reception centre they live in 24 hours per day, this is not school, the school is something else and they cannot have access to it.
(Health professional, Italy)

[I]f you arrive aged 16 and you don’t speak Italian, you can’t access public state schools […] you have to have some requisites […] I would venture to say that even in those years of mandatory education it’s like this. We have asylum seekers and protection holders who are at the age of mandatory education who have not managed to access state schools because these have a tendency to refuse access.
(Language teacher, Italy)

[I]f you arrive aged 16 and you don’t speak Italian, you can’t access public state schools; it’s sometimes also hard to access a CPIA. […] Access to upper secondary schools I think is really rare, if you arrive in Italy at the age of 16 and you are an asylum seeker, […] if you arrive at 16 it’s already a bit too late, it’s late because two years to learn the language, obtain the terza media diploma, go to upper school, […] it’s practically impossible.
(Language teacher, Italy)

We see it every year. And we have kids who, when they are approaching 17 years and 8 months or 9 months, they are freaked out. They are less and less … because they are thinking about: ‘Right, I will find myself on the streets’..
(Teacher, France)

When pupils who attend upper secondary school have been assessed to be 18 years old by the Swedish Migration Agency and they, as I have understood, are moved to an asylum accommodation centre for adults often in a different municipality at very short notice [...] they are, of course, entitled to continue their education in the new municipality, but for them to take this initiative and participate has been very difficult. And they’ve also lost so much of their safety nets – sometimes their entire social milieu. The result is that some of them have chosen to remain in their municipalities even when they are left without accommodation.
(Education authority expert, Sweden)

 

Which means that there are a lot of kids who have very good levels of schooling, high school, […] who could go on to further studies, they will rather direct them at the request of social services towards a vocational qualification like the CAP, BEP [Brevet d’études professionnel – vocational studies certificate].
(School coordinator, France)

The university offers very nice things, like integration programmes, sample courses, and so on. Only our [asylum holders with secondary school qualification] can’t make use of any of that, because the job centre says: ‘you need to be available for the labour market and you only get primary care if you are available for the job market.’ That’s why you can’t be students, because as soon as you are students, you are not available for the labour market any more. And my evaluation is … that they are employed far beneath their actual qualifications, because they don’t get the chance – or only to a very limited extent – to find work in an area in which they are trained.
(School director, Austria)

 

Actually, it is always the same, foreigners basically have, no matter where they are from, always bad experiences with the police. […] Foreigner themselves coming to us […] is very rare.
(Law enforcement expert, Germany)

It’s hard to have someone coming to one of our teams to publicly report a crime, whether it’s theft or violence; I don’t have enough facts and statistics to answer [because] there is a lack of trust from these people towards the institution.
(Law enforcement expert, Italy)

We are more able to speak about this group when it is an offender than when it is victim.
(Law enforcement expert, France)

Finding an apartment in the city without an employment contract is almost impossible. And then it often ends in a way that they are somehow illegally – without a rental contract – in rooms where they pay several hundred euros for a mattress in a mouldy room, where they share a room with other refugees, which is obviously not legal – but there is quite a black market in the area of housing.
(NGO expert, Austria)

They are packed in together with all kinds of cultures and they have very limited space to themselves. From what I can tell, this is a major reason for them becoming victims of crime sooner or later. You become an easy prey, especially when you are as young as 16. This is an important reason for moving them to foster families or move them away from the large asylum accommodation centres. The younger you are and the longer you stay, the greater the risk is of becoming both [a perpetrator and] a victim of crime.
(Law enforcement expert, Sweden)

Children who become adults and grow up alone and have no experience of the world are very susceptible to becoming victims of sexual exploitation, of violence, of fraud, etc. [...] Such incidents have been recorded, described [...] Yes, [the main risk factor] is inexperience and lack of knowledge of the world.
(Government representative working in the integration field, Greece)

A 15-year-old, if he was lucky, he was unaccompanied. He was accommodated in a nice single bedroom […] There are six full-time staff positions for 10 children […] a reference person and cooked food. However, if he was unlucky, he arrived together with his dad and maybe ended up in a shared housing facility. […] A very different key applies there: in some cases we had only two full-time social workers for 600 residents in one shared facility. (Government representative working in the integration field, Germany)

They have been victims of workplace harassment – this is a very common thing because there is a very strong perception among employers that these people [asylum applicants] have a vulnerable legal status and are therefore more susceptible to blackmail.
(NGO legal assistant, Italy)

[Police] constantly let them be stopped, searched, […] empty backpacks, in the wallet – ‘you have a [customer] card in your wallet, that can’t be your wallet, it’s stolen’ – and then they always get fines for something, and the fines are coincidentally exactly as high as the amount of money they happen to be carrying with them. That’s actually the most common thing I hear about [with regard to victimisation].
(NGO child expert, Austria)

That’s difficult because which other persons would I tell: ‘Don’t go to the city centre, don’t drink, and make sure you stay somewhere where you cannot be screened in public’?
(NGO anti-discrimination expert, Germany)

There are some criminal behaviours related … physical integrity (fighting with each other) or attacks on one’s honour and reputation (insulting each other) or other offences such as … someone who wants to leave and uses a fake document in order to leave
(Law enforcement expert, Greece)

Frankly they impress me. I have had about, since 2015, we will say about 300 files. They set me the challenge: nothing, zero.
(Guardian, France)

I think this victim-perpetrator thing is lost. I think that a child that gets involved in this [drug dealing] is both victim and perpetrator. When someone, because of the conditions they live in, is dependent on other people, who put pressure on them or blackmail them.
(Guardian, Greece)

At some point necessity knows no law, so they will steal a mobile phone, a wallet, break into a car but they know it’s illegal.
(Law enforcement expert, France)

This is why we always need to consider the individual case. It is never possible to generalise, or to say, ‘if it is like this in one case, then it is the same in another case’. Everybody is very different, so it is really difficult to tell. […] Moreover, as concerns the pedagogical measures, they have to be adapted to the individual case every single time. And for this reason it is very difficult to say, ‘if it wasn’t for this, then it is always like this’. You cannot tell.
(Law enforcement expert, Germany)

“[The] best way […] of integration is with employment; but they do not always find it [employment], it is not possible […] Who has a job is better integrated.
(Law enforcement expert, Italy)

That’s a discrepancy, because in support we say ‘first he should take up vocational training or education and learn German’, but there he doesn’t earn money. Now he has pressure from the family and there are cases of those who feel obliged to get into drug trafficking so that they can fulfil their responsibilities to the family. Those are cases that we have again and again. Often there are also cases where the traffickers come and say ‘all right, [you still owe me] a few thousand dollars’, and then even more pressure is exercised.
(Government representative working in the integration field, Austria)

The most relevant factor that put the target group at risk of becoming involved in crime is if you for different reasons don’t get them to attend school. If you don’t get them to attend and they continue to be absent and meet others who don’t go to school, they will soon be up to something. I have had a couple of boys who have been stealing and doing drugs and so on, and one is now drifting somewhere in the south of Sweden. So, if you can’t catch them from the start and get them into the school system, there is a really great risk that they will get into strange activities.
(Guardian, Sweden)

In this neighbourhood there are big families and they have too small flats, so the youths don’t get peace and quiet to study because they have many younger siblings. They cannot be at home – it’s too crowded – so they hang around the street corners and in the stairwells. Then they form gangs and it’s easy for criminals to recruit them.
(Housing authority expert, Sweden)

For a period of time asylum applicants are somehow protected, because they’ve got a place to stay [in the reception system], but then this ends and that’s where the big problem lies. They are accorded a form of protection, and then they have to leave these centres. They can’t find a job, because for various reasons [it’s not easy], so they can’t rent a small apartment or something […]. Then they end up in abandoned areas, in which there are ethnic-based groups, but also groups … I wouldn’t know whether to call them criminal, or tending to criminal activities, they dominate the situation and they start imposing rules.
(NGO child expert and psychologist, Italy)

The presence of family members plays a big role for this group, but mostly the family is absent. Those who come with family are always less of a problem than those without family.
(Law enforcement expert, Germany)

Someone who is necessarily marginalised will latch on to a specific group to belong to, so either an ethnic group or a criminal group … ultimately they try any means to latch on to a group.
(Law enforcement expert, France)

The waiting time in the hotspots creates tension, in general. When they are not sure, when there is no precise information about when they will leave, or sometimes in order to cause their removal from the area, they manifest intense, violent behaviour mainly directed towards the place itself, namely by destroying the infrastructure of the hotspots and camps; this frustration is also directed towards different nationalities or towards any different group in the area.
(Law enforcement expert, Greece)

These gangs are recruiting these guys because they [the gangs] know that, if you are an asylum applicant or if you are undocumented, then it’s like you have zero rights. You are invisible, so they can use you to whatever they want. So, you have to [do] the dirty work, as they say, and risk getting into real trouble.
(NGO housing and child expert, Sweden)

I also note that many who receive negative decisions on their age assessments [i.e. are re-registered as adults] noticeably often get negative decisions in their asylum cases. It’s not unusual that they disappear. It’s not unusual that they wind up in criminality, either as victims or that they actually commit crimes of different kinds, primarily acts of violence. It’s mainly this part of the target group, the ones who’ve got a feeling that ‘this is really about to go to rack and ruin. I will probably not be allowed to stay’. It’s my experience, given the clients that I’ve had, that many are at risk in this way.
(Legal expert, Sweden)

Well, to put it simply, one can say that, wherever the state pulls back from particular fields of competence, [religious extremists] enter and take over these tasks.
(Law enforcement expert, Germany)

We haven’t seen at the moment any particular link [between extremism and migration] … It is still being examined if there is such a trend but there is no evidence or statistical data supporting this.
(Law enforcement expert, Greece)

The fact of being an asylum applicant isn’t in any way related to a phenomenon of extremism or radicalisation; these two elements aren’t linked in any way whatsoever.
(Law enforcement expert, Italy)