Let's Work

How do refugees integrate into European society? For the lucky ones, it starts with a job.

- Tim Bouquet

IT IS EARLY AUTUMN 2016 IN BERLIN AND MASOUD TAGHIZADEH, dressed in smart blue overalls, is smiling proudly. He has just won a coveted apprenticeship with Siemens AG, Europe’s largest engineering company. What makes Masoud’s achievement remarkable is that in July of 2014 he spoke no German, he worked in food marketing and he had waded ashore on the Greek island of Kos, one of 43,500 refugees who landed in Greece that year, all dreaming of beginning a new life in Europe.

Masoud is from Ahvaz, a city in south-west Iran, where the Iranian security services, the Vezarat Atelat, routinely target those suspected of opposing the government, especially minority ethnic Arabs such as Masoud.

Masoud,30,was forced to flee suddenly, leaving behind his parents and three brothers, who are still in Iran. “I was on the road five months, firstly in Turkey for three months, where I tried to get a boat to Greece. The first trafficker took a thousand euros from me and disappeared with the money.” Paying out a further thousand euros, Masoud finally made it across the Aegean. After two months he arrived in Athens, where he boarded a truck. “We were told we were going to Northern Europe, but I had no idea where.”

It was his good fortune that after three days he found himself deposited in Berlin, where Siemens announced in September 2015 that it was launching a six-month refugee integration program. The company had already given surplus office space in Munich, Erlangen and Vienna to house more than a thousand refugees. Now its ambitious new program would teach 66 migrants to speak and write German and to learn mechanics and electronics. It would also foster cultural and sporting activity together with the company’s German trainees, aimed at encouraging social integration and preparing the selected migrants for a working life in their adoptive country.