The British newspaper The Guardian said the decision by German Chancellor Angela Merkel years ago to allow irregular migrants to enter her country was a gamble but it paid off.

When the number of immigrants crossing to Europe increased 5 years ago - according to the newspaper - Merkel launched her famous phrase, saying "We will manage it," while her critics considered her decision a "huge mistake", but she proved that she is right in what she went to.

The newspaper recounted in

an article by its director in Berlin,

Philip Oltermann, the story of a Syrian refugee named Muhammad Halak, who achieved great success after his asylum in Germany.

The newspaper attributed the success of the 21-year-old Syrian man coming from Aleppo to his ability to master the German language in a short time, and he is now studying computer science at the Westphalian University of Applied Sciences, and aspires to become a businessman in the field of information technology.

The fifth country to receive refugees the most

However, the Guardian does not consider Halaq to represent all of the 1.7 million people who applied for asylum in Germany between 2015 and 2019, and this number puts Germany in the fifth place in the list of countries most receiving refugees in the world.

According to the article, more than 10 thousand people who came to Germany as refugees since 2015 have mastered the country's language to the extent that they can enter its universities, and more than half of these have found work and pay taxes.

Refugee success stories such as the one whose hero, Mohamed Halak, restored Merkel's optimism, which she expressed in her famous phrase 5 years ago, a phrase that the author believes that she almost lost her position, and even partially retreated from it.

Germany is a strong country

"I simply say that Germany is a strong country," Merkel said at a press conference in Berlin on August 31, 2015, in an attempt to dispel fears of an increased flow of irregular migrants to her country, most of them from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

A refugee takes a selfie of himself and Chancellor Merkel in September 2015 (Reuters)

According to the Guardian, Merkel’s phrase “we will manage” has become a mantra that has been repeated in various corridors of her country, and some have considered that phrase a message of optimism that encouraged millions of other immigrants to take risks and ride the Mediterranean to cross to Europe.

In a reaction not without bitter cynicism, the far-right Alternative for Germany party picked up Merkel’s phrase, claiming that by saying “we will manage” she meant to ask the German people to cope with the high levels of crime, terrorism and chaos.

We'll manage

By 2017, the prevailing opinion was that the phrase "we'll manage" would be a scourge for Merkel, and even US President Donald Trump considered it a "catastrophic mistake" in a statement in January of that year.

For his part, former UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage - in an interview with US Fox News - described what Merkel had done with regard to the migrant issue as “the worst decision taken by a European leader in modern history,” adding that the German chancellor "It is over."

But the Guardian sees otherwise in the article of her bureau chief in Berlin, in the opinion of the newspaper that Merkel is sitting today at the top of the largest economy in Europe, and that her popularity has returned to the level it was in 2015, and that opinion polls have boosted confidence in her party (the Christian Democratic Union) to levels Record, thanks to its handling of the emerging corona virus.

Stop "terrorist" operations

According to the Guardian, in recent years the specter of "jihadist terrorism", which some feared that the refugee crisis would herald its arrival in the heart of Central Europe, has receded, because after a series of 7 attacks in 2016, Germany has not been subjected to further operations of this kind over the past three years.

The newspaper alleges that the motive for these seven attacks was Islamic, culminating in a truck driver storming a Christmas market in Berlin in December of that year.

The newspaper pointed out that crime rates in Germany began to decline by the year 2017, after recording a record high in the years between 2014 and 2016, according to the Federal Criminal Investigation Office, which linked it at the time to the flow of immigrants into the country.

The Guardian quotes at the conclusion of its report on the responsible for the integration of immigrants, Katrina Nevidzial, as saying that Germany has managed to manage the matter, describing it as "a success story even if no one has the confidence to say so yet."