When we started planning the project in 2015 it seemed that there was only one subject in Europe: the refugees. Every day you could read about new actions and conferences about how to manage this problem. The focus seemed mainly to be on how to limit or better stop the stream of refugees. And the media published more and more news showing which negative consequences the huge number of refugees had on the further development of society in European countries. At that time the media were painting a portrayal of threat. On the political level certain parties tried to take advantage of this mood for their benefits. Due to the increasing strength of right-wing, and mostly anti-European parties even the governing politicians reacted more and more nerviously and tried to take over the positions of these anti-European parties by offering national solutions.
The project "Migration in Europe" therefore wants to show that the migration of groups of people within Europe and into Europe is no new phenomenon. The project wants to put the problems concerning the refugees into a larger context, so that the students will get a more objective view on the current situation. The project will show that migration has been a phenomenon of all historical epochs within Europe. The students will get to know that there are quite different reasons for migration and they will learn what consequences migration has had inside the various countries.
We tried to illuminate the phenomenon from a personal point of view: on the one hand, we made a survey that showed many of our students that there was migrant background in their own families. If you go back two or three generations this will be the case in almost any of the families. On the other hand, we tried to get into contact with migrants or refugees in order to get to know more about their personal situations. Then many students worked in foreign countries, on the transnational meetings, and lived there for one week, in a foreign family. So they got some impression about how to be a migrant. All these experiences were collected on this website.