Integration measures provided by welfare organisations

It is now forty years since CARITAS initiated counselling for foreigners and over twenty years since the first guidelines for Social Counselling for Foreigners were issued in 1984. During this time, apart from two exceptions in the 1980s, no comprehensive studies on the status quo, the quantity and the content of social work with migrants has been carried out up to now.

At the beginning of 2001 the efms was commissioned by the Independent Commission of the Federal Government on Immigration to draw up an expert report recording and evaluating the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the numerous offers and services provided by leading welfare organisations in the field of migrant integration.

Thanks to the committed support from the employees of the welfare organisations, both the management and the social workers, and the civil servants in the responsible national and regional ministries, it was possible to provide an informative overview within a short period of time. This overview included expenditures and types of measures of the leading organisations of voluntary welfare work in the field of the integration of migrants in Germany.

In the expert report, first the current discourse on migrant social work is presented and analysed. Following that, the quantitative part of the study illustrates - subject to the availability of data - the flows of resources and the distribution of funding for measures and providers at federal level as well as in individual Länder. This is followed by a content analysis of the wide range of migrant social work. This has become very differentiated since the beginnings of social counselling for foreigners and refugee advice, especially in the last decade. The concrete implementation of these measures is then examined in two local case studies, Nuremberg in northern Bavaria and Mönchengladbach in North-Rhine Westphalia.

Based on the empirical findings, the expert interviews and the relevant specialist literature, concepts for the prospects of migrant social work are developed and recommendations are formulated. The recommendations are summarised in the final chapter of the expert report.

With this expert report the efms presents a study that provides an extensive overview of the activities of the leading welfare organisations in Germany in the field of integration of migrants. This was accomplished despite the very short project period. The results and recommendations of the expert report were included in chapter IV of the report of the Independent Commission on Immigration Bericht der Unabhängigen Kommission "Zuwanderung" of July 4, 2001.

Publication:
Bosswick, Wolfgang / Bronnenmeyer, Veit: Integrationsmaßnahmen der Wohlfahrtsverbände. Bamberg 2001, 175 pages (in German) with 22 tables and 22 illustrations.