Phone apps welcome refugees to Germany - East Idaho News
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Phone apps welcome refugees to Germany

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Ankommen means "arrive" in German and it’s the name of a free new smartphone app launched by the German government to help refugees integrate into society.

The public radio and TV broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk partnered with the Federal Employment Agency and the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees to create Ankommen. The app runs in five languages, including Arabic, English, Farsi, French and German, without an Internet connection, according to the Verge.

Ankommen teaches users basics of the German language, provides information on the government asylum application process and offers tips on how to find jobs or vocational training. Users can also use the app to learn about German values and culture.

"Language is the key to participation in society. With this app and the language course at the Goethe-Institut we make a significant contribution for the critical first few weeks after arriving in Germany," Johannes Ebert, secretary general of the Goethe Institute, said in a statement.

Ankommen is not the first app of its kind. In 2015, the Welcome to Dresden app was developed by two tech companies based in the eastern German city where anti-immigrant sentiments had been flaring, according to the Guardian. The Welcome to Dresden app provides the same services as the Ankommen app and recently expanded its work to the rest of Germany.

According to the Welcome to Dresden app’s website, 80 percent of Germany’s immigrants have access to a smartphone, making an app an ideal platform for delivering information.

“When asylum seekers first arrive, they have more than three months where they can only wait,” she said. “It’s really complicated to find out what to do, how to access the health system, get food. It’s important to do something at the beginning until they are allowed to work, go to school and then afterwards the system works quite well,” Peggy Reuter-Heinrich, the CEO of Heinrich & Reuter Solutions, which worked on the app with Saxonia Systems, told the Guardian.

On Thursday, the World Economic Forum released its 2016 Global Risks Report and identified “large-scale, involuntary migration” as the fourth highest risk of concern facing the planet for the next 18 months. The report said the European migrant crisis posed a wide range of political, social, economic and security risks to both refugees and the countries in which they seek asylum.

However, the report noted, migrants have the potential to bring many benefits as well, including significant contributions to local economies. “In Cleveland, USA, the economic impact of resettled refugees in 2012 was approximately $48 million, ten times what refugee service agencies spent on support for refugees.”

More than 800,00 asylum-seekers traveled to Germany in 2015, and the report praised the country’s efforts to welcome them and called their work an investment in the future. “With an ageing population and labour scarcity, immigration is critical to economic growth, raising employment levels and stabilizing social security systems. To that end, Germany has made significant financial investments and introduced policy reforms to promote integration.”

"The app can inform immediately after their arrival in Germany of their rights and obligations during the asylum procedure," Michael Griesbeck, vice president of the BAMF, told RP Online in German.

dlombardi@deseretnews.com

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