German lawmaker inspired by his country’s reaction to migrants

Migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, call them what you will, but the numbers of new arrivals to Europe are staggering.

Germany alone is expecting to take in about 800,000 refugees by the end of the year.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has said the massive influx of migrants flowing into her country is Europe's biggest migrant crisis in decades and that it will lead to profound change. She’s also called on Europe to agree on a plan to distribute refugees fairly across the continent.

“We have to understand that this is a huge challenge that we can manage,” says Omid Nouripour, a German MP and a speaker for foreign policy for the opposition Green Party in Frankfurt. He’s also an immigrant to Germany from Iran. He says that 800,000 migrants coming to Germany this year alone in search of refuge and employment is a daunting number but that “it means we need solidarity, solidarity with the refugees and solidarity with the other countries in Europe. This is not happening today because we can see that countries like Hungary or Great Britain need quite a long time to accept that this is a European problem and not a German one.”

Nouripour’s own journey helps him appreciate the migrants' ordeal. He fled Iran in 1988 after the war between Iran and Iraq with his parents.

He says the current massive wave of migrants arriving to Germany this summer dwarfs his own experience. The wave is happening, he says, for a variety of reasons, including the growing threat posed by the so-called Islamic State to large populations in the Middle East, and the decline of labor markets in countries such as Kosovo, Bosnia and Greece.

“We have been watching the Middle East collapsing for the past four years. The international community did not do a lot to stop that, so this is the price that we have now to pay for being passive and for not being engaged.”

Nouripour says he sees Germans acting generously to reach out and help the new migrants. For his own part, he says he organized a relief effort to collect and deliver goods to refugees displaced by ISIS in the north of Iraq.

“I just asked people in Frankfurt to come over for two hours and bring whatever they wanted me to bring for those people.  We got 80 tons, 80 tons of goods for those people stranded in the north of Iraq, especially the Yazidi refugees, so there are a lot people here who want to help.”

The UN Refugee Agency estimates that 330,000 internally displaced people in Iraq still live in substandard shelters that fail to protect inhabitants from harsh winter conditions, particularly tough in the northern Kurdistan Region.

Another challenge now facing Germany, says Nouripour, is that German cities need the money that’s been promised by Chancellor Angela Merkel to support migrants “at this moment and not 10 years from now."

But he says meeting that challenge is “mostly a question of synchronization, and I think we can manage.”