Austrian Integration Fund

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The Austrian Integration Fund (ÖIF) is an organization that is active in the integration of migrants and is largely financed by the Federal Ministry for Europe, Integration and Foreign Affairs .

history

The Austrian Integration Fund was established in 1960 by the UN High Commission for Refugees UNHCR and the Federal Ministry of the Interior (MoI) under the name refugee fund the United Nations was founded. Since 2002 he has been gradually responsible for the integration of migrants and is now called the Austrian Integration Fund.

Activities and goals

The aim is the linguistic, professional and social integration of migrants in Austria. Another aim is to provide the Austrian host society with factual information about the challenges and opportunities of integration.

The ÖIF runs nine integration centers in Vienna, St. Pölten (Lower Austria), Eisenstadt (Burgenland), Linz (Upper Austria), Graz (Styria), Klagenfurt (Carinthia), Salzburg, Bregenz (Vorarlberg) and Innsbruck (Tyrol).

In the integration centers, the ÖIF offers integration advice for migrants and arranges financial support, for example for German courses or vocational training. Interested parties can also get information about the integration agreement and funding opportunities from the European Refugee and Integration Fund.

The ÖIF reaches the host society with various publications: The quarterly and free magazine ZUSAMMEN: ÖSTERREICH informs social multipliers from the fields of politics, education, health, safety and leisure about current integration issues. A statistical yearbook on integration and migration and other brochures with facts and figures on selected topics are published annually. Scientific publications on background aspects of the integration issue and on migrants' countries of origin are available online free of charge.

In addition, the ÖIF supports students with a migration background (TOGETHER: ÖSTERREICH Akademie) as well as grants for diploma theses on integration topics at students of Austrian universities or technical colleges.

The websites www.sprachportal.at and www.berufsanicherung.at are aimed at migrants who want to improve their German language skills or who want to have their training abroad recognized.

The ÖIF is also responsible for handling the projects of the European Refugee and European Integration Fund in Austria, which, depending on the fund, provide financial resources for refugee and integration projects. Since 2014, these two European funds have been combined as the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund .

The ÖIF also examines factors that make integration easier or more difficult:

“(At the beginning of October 2017) the Austrian Integration Fund announced the results of its investigation of 16 Viennese mosque associations , for which imams were interviewed and Friday sermons were heard and evaluated. It emerged that only two of the 16 mosques demand and support integration in Austria, while six (mainly Turkish) mosque associations "actively hinder integration into society and in some cases show fundamentalist tendencies". A mosque of the Millî Görüş sect was particularly negative , where, in addition to a "fundamental rejection of the majority society and its values", an "Islamic superiority " and an "accompanying claim to world domination , which should also be enforced by force," was preached. "

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criticism

The publication of the anthology "Islam of European Character" in January 2018 made international headlines. In the essay "Islam in the Balkans - a historical overview up to the present" by the Swiss Romance scholar Saïda Keller-Messahli, the "causes for the political- religious fundamentalism "in the region.

The text met with strong criticism because of its unscientific nature, incorrect information and its portrayal of Muslim Bosniaks as radical Islamists. Historians specializing in the Balkans called the text "malicious propaganda" and asked the Integration Fund in an open letter to have the topic reworked by one of the many experts with Southeast Europe expertise. The letter was signed by the Austrian political scientists Florian Bieber and Farid Hafez, among others .

Web links

Footnotes