What Hong Kong can learn about asylum seekers from Germany’s experience

A short walk from Turmstrasse station on the sprawling Berlin mass transit rail network is the city’s office for health and social affairs. Known as the Lageso – its German acronym – the functionally austere office complex has in recent months become a de facto refugee clearing house where thousands of the world’s dispossessed queue up for the bureaucratic clearance they hope will mark the start of a new life.

As our train pulled into the station, the sound of German, Arabic, English and French filled the packed carriage. Among the disembarking passengers was Joyce Man from Hong Kong, the only Chinese, who completed an eclectic mix of nationalities in what is one of the world’s most multicultural capitals.

Outside Lageso’s complex, in Moabit, two women distributed free food to asylum seekers, who – as the night fell and temperatures dropped – were returning to the temporary shelters spread across the city.

Man, 31, had spent the past two years in Germany and England, where she is studying law in Bristol. In Germany, she is researching asylum policies and preparing an academic paper aiming to draw comparisons with Hong Kong and make recommendations.

While the theme sparked debate in Hong Kong in recent months, with some calling for the resurgence of refugee camps and portraying most protection claimants as “bogus”, in Man’s opinion, her home city had a lot to learn from the mistakes Germany made in the past, and a lot more from the tolerance the country has shown in recent years.

“Germany, for reasons of language and because it’s not a Common Law system, has often been neglected. Hong Kong tends to look to the UK and Australia, which are very bad examples of asylum policy,” she noted. “I think Germany has a lot of important experiences that we can learn from and the purpose of my research is to draw from their experiences and apply them in Hong Kong.”