BERLIN, Dec. 14 (Xinhua) -- The integration of refugees is progressing, according to Ingo Kramer, president of the Confederation of German Employers' Associations (BDA).
"Out of more than one million people who have come to Germany since 2015, 400,000 will soon have an apprenticeship or a job," Kramer told a local newspaper on Friday. The majority of employed refugees would have socially insured jobs and are integrated into the German labor market.
Back in 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel famously stated that "we can do it" with regard to the refugee crisis and the integration of refugees in Germany. Kramer said that Merkel had been right with this assumption.
Kramer emphasized that many migrants had become a "pillar of the German economy... We must continue to be an open society, ready to recruit skilled workers from abroad." If not, there is "a danger that we will fall back economically as we did in the 1990s."
In August, the German Federal Employment Agency (BA) already stated that the integration of refugees in the country's labor market was "slightly better than expected."
BA Director Detlef Scheele commented that integration "is all going quite well", and argued that the situation of refugees did not provide any reason to be pessimistic about the prospects for their integration.
