Germany and Syrian Refugees

Syrian refugees: How were advocates able to get Germany to admit and welcome so many refugees from Syria?, according to Metro News. What could Canada do to admit more Syrian refugees and Since 2011, Germany has welcomed about 100,000 refugees from war-torn Syria substantially higher than most other nations in the EU and far more than Canada, according to Hanns Thomae, a 63-year-old German refugee advocate. In the first four months of this year alone about 20,000 refugees came to Germany, he says. That on top of 47,000 refugees in 2014. Thomae was in Toronto this week to discuss how refugee groups, churches and faith groups in Germany lobbied and challenged the government to open its doors to Syrian refugees. The former director of Refugee Outreach for the Evangelical Church in Berlin and Brandenburg spoke to Torstar News Service on Monday. Certain reasons and factors came together Churches have been working for quite a number of years on the protection of refugees in Germany. Another factor is the mood in society in Germany now is positive towards refugees. They agree we should help refugees. Right-wing extremists tried to fight this and tried to organize public opinion against this. But almost nowhere did the right-wing people succeed in organizing against refugees. We are lucky the government did not play the xenophobia card. We had former governments that did this in the 1990s. Lawyers and courts did during the last few years a good job so protection of refugees would become better. For example in the early 1990s the German government made a law that social help for refugees is much lower than social help for Germans In 2012, the court decided this law was unconstitutional. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.