The German government on Tuesday rowed back on planned cuts to integration courses for migrants, allowing refugees from Ukraine and EU citizens to keep attending them for free.
Home affairs experts from Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives and their centre-left coalition partners in the Social Democratic Party (SPD) agreed that places in the courses are to be made available as part of a national quota based on the available budget.
For asylum-seekers and other migrants, however, integration courses are to be struck as announced by Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt earlier this year.
Hakan Demir, the SPD’s home affairs spokesman, said: “It is important that the admission freeze has been lifted.” To ensure that sufficient people have access to these important courses in the coming years, he added, an agreement on needs-based funding was necessary during the budget negotiations.
The standard courses comprise 600 hours of German lessons and 100 hours of orientation – covering, among other things, the German legal system and values such as tolerance and equality – at a cost of around €3,000 ($3,500) per participant.
In February, the ministry stated that integration courses should in future only be available to people with “positive prospects of remaining in the country.”
Asked about the coalition’s compromise, Dobrindt told journalists in Berlin that there had been “a significant rise in costs in recent years that was no longer justifiable.”
He said he had taken measures to address this, with a focus is on people with a long-term prospect of remaining in the country.