In the name of integration a class of German children were put on an island and forced to role play at being “asylum seekers” with the intention of having them “better understand” migrants.
On the island of Kaninchenwerder just outside the German city of Schwerin local students were told to become “asylum seekers”. “Refugee for the day” is a project designed to get high-school aged children to experience what the Network Working for Refugees (NAF) believes is the plight of migrants in Germany and elsewhere, reports German paper Die Welt.
The children encounter stern-faced border control officers and are made to feel powerless – which aims to give the children a pro-migrant view.
This is the sixth time the NAF has put on the role play event working with Refugee Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Each time the island has been used as a pretend country called the “Republic of Kaninchenwerder” set in the middle of Lake Schwerin with around 100 local children participating.
The students are all given fictional names and identities during the simulation, like 16-year-old Gord who plays a boy named Javad Ahmadnejad, a supposed opponent of the Iranian Islamic regime. The high school student said he wasn’t enjoying himself and would find it more meaningful to help migrants in a more practical way.
Gord, along with the other students, was bussed across the lake in a boat where they are immediately greeted by stern “border guards” when they reach the island. The faux officers, speaking in German and Arabic, direct the students into one of two lines, for asylum or to a process where they will be deported.
Some of the students do not make it to the reception centres and are instead thrown in prison having their phones and belongings confiscated. The imprisonment breaks the jovial mood of many of the students who merely assumed it would be a usual field trip.
A student named Jan, going by the name Hassan, is asked if he wants a lawyer after being put in a cell. The child is then led to an interrogation room where he is asked why he, or rather his character, threw away his passport before entering the made up country.
The entire purpose of the trip, according to organiser Angela Leymannek, is to get the students aware of how much red tape there is for new migrants. She says the participants experience “how it feels to land in a foreign country,” and encourages them to empathise with migrants.
The trip appears to be the latest move by the German government to integrate Germans better with migrants rather than the other way around.
In February, Breitbart London reported that a senior German educator has called for all pupils in the country to be forced to study Arabic until they graduate in the interests of a multicultural state, and other educational experts maintain that Germans should take mandatory Islamic studies to better understand new migrants.
The German government has also funded equally strange programmes in the name of integration, such as teaching migrant boys how to properly flirt with German girls in a so-called “flirt school”.
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