A shocking new report claims that only 8.2 percent of children in elementary schools with migrant backgrounds in the German city of Duisburg are able to speak the German language fluently.
The revelations come from a report to be presented by Dr Ralf Krumpholz, the city’s Assistant Minister for Integration, and revealed that at least 16.4 percent of migration-background children in the school system speak no German at all, Rheinische Post reports.
The report claims that only 8.2 percent of migrant-background children in 2017 could pass exams with flawless German and that 50.1 percent came from households in which another language other than German was spoken.
When broken down by districts within the city, particularly in the suburbs, the number of German-speaking migration-background children are shown to be a small minority, with the district of Hochfeld having 87.9 percent of children speaking a different language in their everyday lives.
The language barrier has impacted life in the city in several ways, including making it harder for doctors to treat children with parents who speak little or no German.
The report comes as the demographic changes in Germany due to mass migration are becoming more and more clear. In Frankfurt, native Germans became a minority in 2017 tt the first German city where migration-background residents outnumber Germans.
German-speaking native children are minorities in several schools across the country, including the Carl Anton Henschel School in the city of Kassel where a six-year-old girl named Yara, the only German in her class, spoke of bullying which included physical violence because she was German.
Schools in Berlin with majority migration-background pupil populations have reported similar instances of bullying, often for religious reasons — including children bullied for eating pork.
“I’m in seventh grade in a high school in Schöneberg. There, I am marginalised because I am German and eat pork. They swear in Turkish and Arabic about me,” one pupil revealed.