On the Tuesday afternoon, when the debate on the European Pact on Migration and Asylum is taking place in Parliament, three experienced refugee aid activists will report in Dudelange’s town hall on the experiences they have had in around five decades of working with asylum seekers. It’s like a journey down memory lane through 50 years of asylum policy, starting with the refugees from the Chilean military dictatorship who came to Luxembourg and found refuge here, through the “boat people” from Vietnam to those people who fled the Balkan wars in the 1990s – and up to the “refugee crisis” from the Middle East ten years ago, the Ukrainians who fled the Russian attack on their homeland and the Eritreans, who are among the largest today groups of asylum seekers in this country.
“There were no corresponding structures back then,” says Christiane Welter, who was responsible for the admission of refugees at the Service de l’Immigration for many years, recalling the beginnings of her work in this area. “A lot depended on the voluntary work of the volunteers,” she remembers. There were no suitable accommodation options. Everything seemed to have to be improvised. Before the actual asylum policy in this country was institutionalized, it was not least a question of the “welcome culture” and voluntary commitment, long before this became a fixed term in Germany, at least for a short time in 2015.
