After the Welcome Fades

Angela Merkel’s Wir schaffen das—"we can do this"—landed in 2015 like something genuinely unexpected from a German chancellor: an emotional commitment, a public bet on decency. The welcome culture that followed was real. So was the backlash. Within months, right-wing populists had weaponized every refugee-related headline, and the volunteers who showed up at train stations with food and translation apps found themselves accused of naivety at best, national betrayal at worst.

Swedish journalist Miléne Larsson went to Berlin for VICE News to find out what had actually changed once the arrival period was over—what life looked like for people from Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere after the cameras moved on and the political conversation curdled. She talked to both refugees and Germans and asked the questions that tended to get lost between the poles of "open arms" and "Fortress Europe."

One of the more unsettling findings: some refugees were themselves asking for the borders to close. Not because they’d absorbed right-wing talking points, but because the people arriving in 2016 were walking into a support infrastructure that was already overstretched, and those who’d come earlier could see it. The logic was grim and practical—better a closed door than an open one that leads nowhere. That kind of nuance doesn’t fit either side’s preferred story, which is probably why it rarely makes it into the political argument.