No one visiting the Ausländerbeirat this week was left in any doubt that things are going to be different, something the chairman Franz Zenker made very clear at the beginning of the committee’s meeting.

But his good intentions almost came to a halt when one of the other committee members asked to move the second item on the agenda (“minutes of the last meeting”) to the non-public part of the meeting, or hold the non-public part first.  Considering how long the non-public part actually took later on, it may have quicker to have just done one of those two rather than discuss the possibilities.

In the end, and after much discussion, the agenda was not changed but the approval of the non-public part of the minutes was moved to the non-public part of the meeting.

Moving on to the integration monitoring report and the ominous question of who had actually read it, the change that Franz Zenker had talked about became very clear. [Read more…]