Theses about the decentralized camp system in Germany

Tobias Pieper (2004)

The system of accommodation for refugees in Germany can be described as institutionalized legal system of discrimination and of intended reduction of the standard of living. As such it is a system of forced social disintegration. In addition to the de facto exclusion from the labor market and the payment of the thereby necessary (and also cut) welfare in non-cash benefits, the accommodation of refugees in decentral asylums is the foundation of areal exclusion and banishment. The decentralized accommodation system in Germany consists of decentral small camps that are half-open - meaning the refugees can always vanish into illegality - which are connected to each other by a management system. There are different degrees of repression by accommodation, for example pensions in big cities, facilities in the middle of forests, where the refugees have to share rooms, the new deportation camps and deportation prisons. In total, one million people are living in these facilities. The basic structure of this camp system is the “Residenzpflicht”. By fragmentation of space and restraining refugees in administrative districts the single camp becomes part of the repressive camp system. This way, the system methodically excludes people who are not economically useful by oppressing them, which always implies the threat of deportation.
The factor of the “Residenzpflicht” enables us to describe the individual facilities for refugees as (refugee-) camps (in German: “lager”). The word “lager” (camp) describes a temporary accommodation facility for many people in a cramped space. Thus this term can be used as a generalized description for all kinds of facilities. I suggest the use of the term “Dezentrales Lagersystem” - which means decentralized camp system - or the description of the particular facility. The term “Lager” (without specification) is often used to scandalize because of the associations with National Socialism, which makes differentiation necessary. It always makes sense to describe the empirical facts as accurately as possible. The decentralized refugee camp system in Germany is already repressive enough in itself to scandalize it and to fight for its abolishment. The current system of housing refugees in these camps originated at the end of the 1970s, mainly to discourage refugees from coming to Germany. The decentralization of accommodation was established to provide the economy with cheap labor after the recruiting of migrants was stopped in 1973. Five years later, the accommodation in camps was introduced. The structure of the camp system was then administratively expanded to affect over one million people. Parallel to that, the economy was reorganized, so that today’s economical function of the camp system results from its embedding in the postfordistic relations of production. This economical function can be described as buffer function between regular and irregular sectors of the ethnical differentiated labor market. In regions with an increased requirement for labor (like Baden-Württemberg) many refugees have work, so refugees from the eastern regions of Germany migrate to the south or west to work illegally. An increased use of the term “Lager” for general occurrences or mechanisms of segregation in society would be incorrect, because the specific combination of places to detain refugees, the legal degradation and the exclusion from social participation which characterizes the decentral camp system would be weakened. The term “Lagerstruktur” (camp structure) thus becomes arbitrary and loses its analytical sharpness in the description of reality.
There are other mechanisms of segregation that cannot be included in the term “Lager”, and should be described in detail. The capitalistic economy of the FRG is a determining factor, and its asylum laws form the legal foundation for the devaluation and removal of rights of migrants. On the one hand this serves the purpose of providing cheap laborers without rights, on the other hand the domestic effectivity of racist argumentations and their instrumentalisation. The decentralized camp system is the repressive result of the laws concerning foreigners and at the same time the thus created images are used to shape and justify the racist policy. There is a direct connection to the migrants, who come to the FRG to work, the people without papers, who have the possibility to survive illegally. As soon as these people come into the open, they are pulled into the camp system by being “tolerated”, which eventually ends in deportation. Even though the specific reasons for migration – political vs. material – are important to the individual refugees, the repressive structures affect all refugees coming to the FRG in the same way. This opens possibilities for broader social networking. The current policy of neoliberal restructuring is the economical deregulation and removal of social rights. This forces both migrants who have been living in Germany for a long time as well as foreigners with a German passport to enter the illegal sectors of the labor market. This doesn’t really create competition in the labor market – it rather induces a general decline in wages – but the perceived competition is used to raise racist contempt of the “German collective” against the migrants. This topic provides a chance for working together, not by focusing on the segregation – as this is not the goal of this tour and would not do justice to the repressions of the decentralized camp system – but on the fact of the common deregulation of social structures. It is in the interest of the ruling class that the affected individuals all fight for their own part of the interest, instead of focusing on the common denominator. A favorable goal would be to ask the social forums to join the fight against the decentral camp system and the capitalist exploitation of people. This means to focus on racism as an instrument of the ruling class, to fight it by supporting the tour and building a resistance structure.