1 Bernhard Streitwieser, PhD Margaret Taylor, MA Rachel Moody, MA George Washington University 1 Introduction Over the last year, the mood toward immigrants and refugees has considerably darkened in some of the countries that are best resourced to help them. In the United States, for example, a new administration has changed the tenor of America’s historic openness to migrants and refugees; in the UK, the ‘Brexit’ vote has signaled a desire to leave the European Union, largely to stave off migration; and in other countries in continental Europe, for example in France, Holland, Hungary, and Germany, far right parties have made some electoral gains, although voters have stopped short of giving them significant political power. In such a climate of increased nationalist tendencies and antipathy toward globalism and the international elements that come with it, be they migrants, refugees, or even international students, the importance of embracing global diversity and its value to society has become particularly urgent. According to the German Federal Ministry of the Interior, since 2015 when the influx of refugees seeking to enter Europe grew, Germany has taken in 890,000 new migrants, a figure reduced from 1.1 million originally estimated. While the majority (nearly 40%) of refugees have come from Syria, other asylum seekers fleeing civil war, social unrest, and extreme poverty have included Albanians, Kosovars, Afghans, Iraqis, Serbians, Eritreans, Macedonians and Pakistanis, among only the top ten recorded countries. In this study, we focused on Germany and how its higher education system has been responding to the increased refugee flow since 2015, and in particular how its universities have rolled out new and innovative programming to accommodate the 30,000-50,000 eligible students who will be seeking entry into German universities in the coming years. Germany has been faced with both the challenge of processing, and the opportunity of integrating, these students through education into its education system and workforce. But this aspiration has also bumped up against fears among some constituencies that doing so will ultimately fail or adversely strain Germany’s generous social system. The Syrian Conflict and Displacement It is difficult to argue that the ongoing Syrian Civil War has been nothing short of a modern-day tragedy of historic proportions. The carnage continues at the time of writing. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), since 2011 when the Syrian Civil War began during the Arab Spring protests, 6.3 million Syrians have become internally displaced; over five million have become stateless refugees primarily in other parts of the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) but also in smaller numbers in Europe and safer havens 1 This article has been adapted from Streitwieser, B., Brueck, L, Moody, R., and Taylor, M. (In press). The Potential and Reality of New Refugees Entering German Higher Education: The Case of Berlin Institutions. Forthcoming in European Education: Issues and Studies, special issue on “internationalization in conflict-ridden societies and within migrant populations." Challenges and Innovations: Germany’s Effort to Integrate Refugees into Higher Education 1