This is not just a disaster for Germany. Attackers involved in the massacre at the Bataclan in Paris, and the Brussels airport bombing, used the flow of refugees in Europe to escape detection by police. The Schengen Agreement, which all but did away with internal border checks in Europe, has positively transformed the way Europeans interact with one another. After he murdered a dozen Germans, Amri was able to escape to France and then Italy before he was caught.
Germany thought it could assimilate newcomers. It believed it had done so before, having absorbed Turkish "guestworkers" during the 1960s and 1970s. But there are notable differences between Turks and the current refugee wave. Turkey had already undergone significant secularization. This new wave of migration into Germany is showing signs of developing some of the generational problems that mass Islamic migration has created in France. Syrian migrants find that the Arabic-language mosques in Germany, often funded by Saudi Arabia, preach a form of Islam far more fundamentalist and hostile to Western people and culture than anything they knew in Syria. Secondly, Turks came with skills that were immediately put into employment in the German economy. The new migrants are hardly working at all.
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Perhaps worst of all, Merkel's great defense of "European values" could mean a forever changed European life. The border-free world that symbolized peace and prosperity, and that was the practical experience of widening freedom and possibility for Europeans under 45, is now a source of danger. German mayors warn women not to travel unaccompanied or seem too "frisky," lest they invite an assault. French synagogues are surrounded by military personnel. Major events in large European cities are heavily guarded with the portentous and menacing presence of machine guns and bomb-sniffing dogs. Instead of finding new ways of integrating migrants, the individual European states are coming up with new ways to surveil them. This is a Europe no one wanted.
