“Was it hatred of Germany?”

On New Year’s Eve, Berlin and other major German cities resembled a civil war: rioters set fire to cars and buildings, looted shops and attacked police officers, firefighters and paramedics.

Most of the rioters were young foreigners, two-thirds of the 145 detainees in Berlin had a migration background. Berlin Mayor Franziska Giffey, 44, said most of them were “children and young people born in Berlin”.

“Don’t even know where the people came from”

This puts the spotlight on integration in major German cities – it has clearly not been possible to integrate immigrants into society there. Cihan Sinanoglu warns against jumping to conclusions. For the scientist of the German Institute for Integration and Migration Research, far too little is known: “What did these young people say? Was it blind vandalism? Hate Germany? Or party tourism? We don’t even know where the people came from.”

Sinanoglu says you should take what happened on New Year’s Eve very seriously — and make sure it doesn’t happen again. But: “Justifying the violence of New Year’s Eve with another form of culture falls short”, the expert believes. Rather, he suspects that toxic masculinity—”that is, letting the dude hang out”—alcohol and group dynamics also played a role.

No access to the labor market

Sinanoglu does not deny that there is a problem – for example with foreign clans in Berlin-Neuköln. But you need to investigate the reasons for this. “One reason for the emergence of criminal structures was the blocked access to the labor market,” he says, for example. Many of the criminal clan structures were related to the fact that many of the members of these extended families had no access to the labor market.

The Ukrainian refugees, who did not have to apply for asylum and could take care of themselves much more quickly, would show what faster integration in the labor market would bring.

“Poverty is hereditary”

For Sinanoglu, it is clear that there is a social problem behind the failed integration. In Germany, not everyone still has equal access to education, work and health. You can see this clearly in the field of education: “The question of how far you can get in life depends on where you come from. Poverty is inherited because children from a difficult background are not given a chance to work their way up.” According to him, we should start there and offer, for example, national day schools and non-discriminatory teaching materials.

According to Sinanoglu, Germany must finally understand that “we are a migration society – and behave accordingly”. His suggestions about what that entails are explosive. “Why”, he asks, “do we force ourselves on the German language in the education system? In a globalized world, multilingualism is an advantage.”