You let people in, and yet the embrace grows thinner with each passing year. In one era the door swung wide and 84 percent felt the warmth of welcome; a little later it narrowed to 78; now only 65 percent sense that welcoming hand still extended in 2023. Discrimination follows a stubborn map: women with intermediate education report more housing discrimination, and refugee men in East Germany face higher discrimination across several fronts. The patterns come from long-running panel data, with Ukraine and Turkey left out of the sample. Public debates about strict immigration limits and a rise in group-based hostility in 2023 no doubt gnawed at the walls of hospitality. Still, the population of newcomers clings to a straightforward ambition: to stay, to integrate, to naturalize. Nearly all—about 98 percent—either plan to apply for or have already pursued naturalization, with naturalized individuals rising from 2.1 percent in 2021 to 7.5 percent in 2023, and the share filing for naturalization climbing from 7.3 percent to 25.7 percent. Xenophobia remains a public worry, with 54 percent of refugees reporting anxiety about hostility in 2023. Beyond the grand arithmetic of integration, the data reveal a more intimate charge: children born in Germany to refugee mothers lag behind peers aged two to four in language, social relations, and motor skills, a lag shaped by the mother’s mental health, education, and employment. Yet in the most practical daily tasks those children sometimes outperform, perhaps because independence has been drilled into them as a form of resilience.

If one possesses even a fraction of the old-world assurance that the modern state has a monopoly on civility, one should be appalled by this trajectory. The decline in felt welcome is not a mere mood swing among a restless electorate; it is the erosion of a social covenant that propels a prosperous society forward. When education, gender, and geography conspire to produce fresh forms of discrimination, the fault line runs through the institutions that are supposed to shield the vulnerable, not through the virtues of those who seek a chance at a better life. And let us not pretend that a louder national dialogue about borders and limits is neutral silk sewn over rougher politics; it is the loom that frays the fabric of hospitality itself. The host nation cannot outsource humanity to good intentions alone—policies must translate generosity into tangible scaffolding: stable housing, equitable access to services, robust anti-discrimination enforcement, and serious investment in mental health and family support. Only then will the hope—nearly universal among the newcomers—that they will naturalize, contribute, and blend into the fabric of the nation become a durable reality rather than a cherished aspiration.

As for the little Germans of tomorrow born to refugee mothers, we must acknowledge the heavier lift they carry. The child who arrives with a mother navigating poverty, trauma, or precarious employment cannot be expected to flourish on mere daylight optimism. If the nation wishes to harvest the talent that is surely among these children, it must fortify the maternal and familial conditions that shape early development—mental health care, education, consistent support. Independence is a virtue, but not a substitute for systematic nurture. The reward for such investment is not charity; it is a more prosperous, more resilient citizenry that the nation can rely on when the world’s economies and values tilt and twist.

If this is the state of “welcome” in a country that prides itself on order, refinement, and merit, then the future belongs to those who purchase hospitality with genuine policy, not to those who merely declare it. The leaders who pretend that rhetoric alone secures social harmony risk waking up one day to find their own comforts undone by a climate that no longer tolerates half-measures. Invest in the people who seek to belong, and we will indeed all benefit from a civilization that remembers how to be generous without surrendering its standards.