Jonathan Garfinkel’s latest book is In a Land Without Dogs the Cats Learn to Bark.
One hot summer’s night in Berlin, I was minding my own business on a bar patio when a young man turned to me and asked if I was German. I told him no. I could tell from his accent that he wasn’t either, though he made a point of telling me he grew up right where we were sitting – in the immigrant neighbourhood of Wedding.
I asked him his name. He smiled and told me it was complicated. “I have two: Arber and Albion.”
Arber – or Albion – told me his story of how he came to Germany.
His parents were born in Tirana, the capital of Albania. In the 1990s, as Yugoslavia fractured and wars tore through the Balkans, Albania collapsed into its own political and economic chaos. Facing an uncertain future, his parents made it to Belgium and filed for asylum. Albion was born some months later. Their application was rejected. Rather than return to Albania, they decided to try Germany – his mother had a sister in Berlin.
Because of their failure to secure asylum status in Belgium, Albion’s parents decided to embellish their story. At the border they said they had fled the civil war in Kosovo as minority Albanians. Knowing Kosovo’s civil registry was in chaos, they claimed their passports and ID cards had been lost. They were let into the country under fictional names. So Arber was born.
They ended up in Berlin, settling in Wedding, just up the street from where I live. After one year, their asylum status was rejected, but unlike in Belgium, they were allowed to stay in Germany, falling into a bureaucratic loophole called Duldung.
Migrants wait inside a tent to get an appointment at the central registration centre for refugees and asylum seekers in Berlin in January, 2016. Germany has taken on more refugees than anywhere else in Europe since 2013.Markus Schreiber/The Associated Press
Duldung literally means “tolerated.” As of 2022, 248,000 other German refugees have this status: tolerated to stay either due to some bureaucratic technicality or because it’s too dangerous for them to return home.
Having Duldung meant Arber’s family was given free health care and social assistance to cover rent and food costs. Two years later they had a daughter. Twenty-five years later, the family is still here, with the same Duldung status, living off state assistance. Stateless and officially unemployable, Arber has never left the borders of Germany.
Arber was wearing a black suit and tie that night – a vintage affair two sizes too big. His dark hair was slicked back, and he belied a calmness and confidence that surprised me. Having to deal with German immigration, even as a Canadian, is not an easy affair. The Auslanderbohoerde (immigration office) is famously nerve-racking. When I last went in to renew my visa, I discovered people in the stairwells, crying due to rejections, the pain of waiting, a bureaucracy as old as Bismarck. And here, right beside me, was a young man with no identification, no job and no future. He calmly rolled a cigarette, lit it, and took a sip from his grapefruit martini.
His partner, Elsa, a waitress at the bar, joined us. They were celebrating their five-year anniversary – thus the suit. She put her hand in Arber’s and told me he couldn’t come to Finland, where she was born, to meet her family and friends.
I asked why they didn’t get married; Elsa said it wouldn’t make a difference since she’s not German. And they couldn’t get married in Finland because he can’t leave Germany. They’d hired a lawyer, but Arber explained the legal argument was complicated. Since he has no proof of who he is or where he comes from, he’s been forced to throw his parents under the bus, arguing that because of their fiction he is now in this bureaucratic mess. If he wins his case, Arber’s parents will be deported to Albania. His parents are regretful, he said; they wish they’d dealt with things differently. But they did it for their children’s futures. The irony is their future is more uncertain than ever. I asked Arber how he feels about the thought of his 65-year-old father being deported to a country he hasn’t lived in for 30 years. Arber shrugged and said, “What can I say? There’s no other way.”
Arber knows that with tightening immigration policies, and the rise in popularity of anti-immigrant right-wing parties like the Alternative for Germany (AfD), he needs to act fast.
AfD co-leaders Tino Chrupalla, left, and Alice Weidel at party headquarters after the announcement of the initial results in snap federal parliamentary elections on Feb. 23, 2025. The far-right party came second in the election.Sean Gallup/Getty Images
I asked if they reject his case, what will he do?
“I don’t have a clue,” he said.
To complicate matters, he discovered that a part-time job he’d had the year previous was deemed illegal; he’d worked more hours than the few allowed for someone of his status. Even his attempts at being a productive member of society were coming up against roadblocks.
I left the bar that night slightly drunk and very confused. Passing a late-night späti, I eyed the man behind the counter and thanked him. He seemed surprised; I hadn’t asked for anything. So I ordered a doner, but really, I wanted to hear his story. How many Arbers have I walked by over the years? How many live in Duldung limbo? I went home and fell into a restless sleep.
I was bothered by Duldung’s Kafka-like absurdity coupled with the sheer waste of someone’s life. How can someone stay in limbo for 25 years, have no identity, not be able to work, study or travel while also being supported by the state? Is it just a bureaucratic loophole? Or is there something intentionally malicious in the law? Is it particular to Germany, or a symptom of a bigger problem? And why does he have to sacrifice his parents in order to stay?
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In German author Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel, Go, Went, Gone, published in 2015 during the Syrian refugee crisis, an asylum seeker from Niger, Rashid, describes Duldung as being tolerated “the way you tolerate a toothache” – something painful you live with but cannot fix.
Arber’s story points to one of the AfD’s arguments against illegal immigrants and asylum seekers: Why are people who aren’t supposed to be here allowed to stay and get money from the government? They argue that illegals stay in Germany to milk the system. Yet Arber is an example of someone who wants to leave the system. He hates depending on the money he receives from the government, €820 a month. He feels unable to take care of himself, reliant on other people. And he wants to be a schoolteacher, a field that desperately needs people in Berlin. He also wants to be what he believes he is: German. After all, he attended public schools, German is his first language, his friends are German. But the birth certificate he has says “Albion.” Arber does not officially exist.
I’m not sure why Arber’s story touched me. Maybe it’s because I’m the grandchild of Polish Jewish immigrants who has benefited from their epic migration. Or maybe it’s the climate of the moment: the same anxiety driving ICE deportations in America and the AfD’s rise in Germany is reshaping politics across the West. The fear of the outsider has become the defining political currency of our time.
In Germany, the discourse takes on particularly dark resonances. In January, 2025, the AfD’s regional branch in southwestern Karlsruhe city mailed more than 30,000 fake deportation tickets to migrants. The tickets, dated Feb. 23, the day of the federal election, stated a passenger by the name of “illegal immigrant” was booked on a one-way flight from Germany to a “safe country of origin.” While the party’s Karlsruhe candidate claimed this was a “publicity stunt,” the gesture had particularly uncomfortable connotations: The Nazis sent actual deportation train tickets to Jews before the Second World War.
I’ve lived in Wedding for 15 years, one of Berlin’s most immigrant-dense neighbourhoods. Coming from multicultural Toronto, I never found its demographics unsettling the way some of my German friends did – I grew up in that kind of mosaic and believed it enriched the city. What unsettled me about Arber’s story is the lack of will to integrate him, even after 25 years. While for decades they’ve invited migrant “guest” workers from Turkey and the Balkans, Germany has always been ambivalent about allowing asylum seekers into their country. Today, that ambivalence is gone. Immigration is the problem that needs urgent fixing so everything will improve: Inflation will stop, our democracies will function smoothly, rents will lower, and people will have good jobs not threatened by AI.
Many of us come from elsewhere – in Germany, a quarter of its people are immigrants. Foreigners, legal and illegal, are the fabric of our cities, a richness we take for granted.
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Germany has taken on more refugees than anywhere else in Europe since 2013. It has come at a huge financial cost – between €13- and €17-billion each year to incorporate, feed and house asylum seekers. But it goes beyond economics. “They don’t share our values,” is a comment I even hear from progressive German friends when talking about Muslim Arabs on the streets of Berlin, Frankfurt or Koln. In Germany, there are problems with integration; Turkish and Arab neighbourhoods often exist in their own ghettoed reality. It’s no wonder that a recent report showed 25 per cent of migrants want to leave Germany. People feel unwelcome. Is it because Germans feel newcomers lack the will to integrate, or a deeper, structural racism from the German state? Is it a problem of education about other cultures, or a problem that other cultures might want their own education and rules? It’s difficult to untangle. Whatever it is, the mood has polarized. How do we return to a more nuanced conversation where we remember the benefits of a diverse society, both economically and culturally, creating incentives for people to want to integrate? Which is to ask: Could we create a fairer and better system? What if instead of closing borders or deporting people, immigration could help solve some of the problems in Europe today? Arber’s story – his willingness to work, his desire to integrate, to be accepted as who he believes he is entitled to be – challenges the public mood.
Last June, the AfD requested from the Federal Ministry of Labor the first names of the top 14 people who receive state aid. The implications were clear: The AfD wanted to show that migrants and refugees from Arab Muslim countries were draining the public coffers, taking away apartments and health care.
Asylum seekers have been attracted to Germany for its relative openness, as well as social assistance that includes free health care and education. It’s one of the AfD’s biggest arguments for the ineptitude of the current government (and the argument they built their popularity on). It’s also a criticism of Angela Merkel’s 2015 decree, “We can do this,” when she boldly let in a million Syrian refugees. The idea was that a country as wealthy as Germany should open its doors to those in need. Many Germans I know sponsored Syrian refugees, giving them clothing, food and sometimes even a room to stay in until they got on their feet. Images of Germans showing up at the Munich train station with teddy bears welcoming Syrian refugees were all over the news.
Migrants arrive by train to Munich on Sept. 13, 2015.Philipp Guelland/Getty Images
With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it is estimated there are 1.2 million Ukrainian refugees in Germany now. There’s no question, Germany has taken on a lot, the most asylum seekers in Europe. One of the arguments voiced by politicians both left and right is that the rest of Europe needs to do more to accommodate asylum seekers. The Dublin Accords, which declare a refugee can only gain access to asylum status in the country they first land in, needs to be used more efficiently and consistently. But instead of finding a more equitable and effective system, countries such as Germany are simply closing their borders.
The generous mood of Ms. Merkel’s days has shifted significantly in the past two years. More border checks in the formerly open Schengen zone have contributed to a drop in illegal migration – asylum seekers are down over 50 per cent in two years. The AfD argument has become normalized; mainstream parties like the centre-right Christian Democratic Union have adopted some of their policies. Yet Germany is on the brink of a demographic disaster: an aging population and falling birth rate mean a critical shortage of skilled workers, straining pensions and elderly care. It is estimated that until 2040, almost 300,000 migrants a year will be needed to fill those positions. The cruel irony is that Germany’s doors remain open for those with work visas – it’s people fleeing humanitarian danger, people like Arber, who no longer seem to fit the bill.
I recently spoke to Marc Helbling, a sociologist at the University of Mannheim, who studies migration and Islamophobia. When I told him Arber’s story, he went straight to the structural trap: “It’s in the interest of Germany to let asylum seekers work and go to school – it’s good not to let them sit around and do nothing. But doing that, they integrate.”
Yet, in helping newcomers integrate, Germany is setting itself up to keep them. “If they’re here for many years, it’s harder to deport them,” says Prof. Helbling.
Not only that, but deportation, even if politically palatable to the German public, has its own complications. The receiving country has to agree. “Arber’s parents would need the Albanian government to accept them.”
The left, he added, has no unified answer – some want detention centres at EU borders, others prefer to keep the issue quiet, others argue for more openness. What’s consistent across the political spectrum is selective storytelling. “Parties like the AfD focus on terrorism and abuse of the system. We rarely hear the success stories – the Syrians who’ve integrated, found jobs, built lives. The media doesn’t want to talk about that. Nor do the politicians,” says Prof. Helbling.
Meanwhile, the results of the AfD’s request for the first names of state welfare recipients showed surprising results – the top four names included Michael, Andreas, Thomas and Daniel. The fact that such questions are even being asked by official political parties, and answered by said ministries, is indicative of a much bigger problem.
Recently I got together with Arber again. His case is slowly moving forward; his mother has now joined his legal team; his father will take the hit and go back to Albania if the courts decide so.
I wanted to assure him things would turn out okay. But what was I assuring him of? The political mood will worsen. The number of displaced people fleeing war zones, economic hardship and environmental catastrophe will likely only increase in the years to come. The problem isn’t going away. That he was deemed part of the problem weighed on him. That it was embedded into the German state structure rendered him hopeless.
The asylum seekers in Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel protest their treatment by the German government. They hold placards that say, “We Become Visible.” To be seen, to be heard, to be considered human rather than statistics to advance political agendas in difficult times, or targets of racism and fear.
In the novel, asylum seekers are forced to take jobs no one else wants. An engineer collects garbage, a doctor drives a taxi. Many – like Arber – await their deportation hearing, afraid that any moment their lives can be upturned. Others hope to stay and carve out a life and be accepted. Ms. Erpenbeck understands something crucial: the tension between integration and deportation isn’t just a bureaucratic loophole – it reflects Germany’s desire for the benefits of migrant labour while keeping Germany “German.”
Arber’s story – his inability to attend university, his punishment for working, his forced choice between his own existence and his parents’ deportation – exposes the cruelty not as a bug in the system, but as a feature. Can a country benefit from migrant labour while maintaining the fiction it doesn’t need migrants? Can it integrate people for years, then deport them? And what exactly is Germany protecting by keeping someone like Arber stateless?
Meanwhile, Arber and Albion await their fate.