The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has granted its Nansen Prize to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her handling of the 2015 migrant crisis, praising her for taking in over a million asylum seekers.
Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, lavished praise for the former German leader stating, “By helping more than a million refugees to survive and rebuild, Angela Merkel displayed great moral and political courage.”
“It was true leadership, appealing to our common humanity, standing firm against those who preached fear and discrimination. She showed what can be achieved when politicians take the right course of action and work to find solutions to the world’s challenges rather than simply shift responsibility to others,” Grandi added according to a press release from the UNHCR.
According to the Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung, the prize received by Merkel also comes with around $150,000 of cash.
The UNHCR also praised Merkel for ” employment schemes and labour market integration” of Syrian asylum seekers, however, data from 2019 revealed that as many as65 per cent of the asylum seekers who came during the migrant crisis remained unemployed.
Of those who were employed, around a fifth were working “mini-jobs” and those working full-time earned just 1,564 euros a month on average.
A report from that same year also revealed another legacy of Merkel’s rule in Germany, in that Germans were far more likely to be victims of crime by migrant perpetrators than the other way around.
“In the area of murder and manslaughter, 230 Germans fell victim to a criminal offence in which at least one suspected immigrant was involved,” the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) reported and noted that during the same period 33 asylum seekers were victims of murder or manslaughter involving a suspect with German citizenship.
The enduring legacy of Merkel’s migration policies has also radically transformed the demographics of the country to the extent that over a quarter of all residents in the country now come from migration backgrounds, totalling around 22.3 million people.
Among young people, the situation is even starker with nearly half of children under the age of six in Western Germany coming from a migrant background. In 2017, under Merkel’s leadership, the city of Frankfurt became the first major German city in which more than half of the residents were from migrant backgrounds, putting native Germans in the minority.