Immigration in Germany, Multikulturell? Wir?

How a fresh debate on multiculturalism in Germany clashes with the country’s need for more immigrants

Source: The economist

HOW well does Halime Cengiz fit into Germany? A “typical guest worker’s child”, she wears a hijab and spends much time at the Mevlana mosque in Gröpelingen, a Bremen neighbourhood with many immigrants. She has a German passport but “would never say I’m German” (or Turkish). She calls herself “a Bremer with Turkish roots”. Yet she also speaks flawless German. Neither her marriage nor her veil was forced on her. Part of her mosque work is with churches, lowering barriers between Muslims and Christians. She urges parents to send their children to kindergarten to improve their German. The parents fret about their children becoming “too German”, but Mrs Cengiz allays such fears. She may be a model migrant after all.
Good immigrants and bad, how many and of what kind are all worrying Germany just now. A book claiming that Muslim immigrants and the underclass were bringing about Germany’s downfall by breeding too fast had a print run of over a million by the end of September (and cost its author, Thilo Sarrazin, his job on the Bundesbank board). Seeing its success, politicians abandoned political correctness. Further immigration from Turkey or Arabia is no longer welcome, said Horst Seehofer, Bavaria’s premier and head of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian arm of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. The CSU asked that immigrants embrace the Leitkultur (dominant culture). Even Mrs Merkel joined in. Multiculturalism—the idea that immigrants can recreate their culture in Germany—has “utterly failed,” she said last month. New polls confirm Germans’ hostility towards immigrants, especially Muslims.
Awkwardly, Germany is bashing foreigners just when it needs them. The workforce is shrinking and growth is raising demand for skilled labour. Skills shortages cost the economy €15 billion ($21 billion) last year, says Rainer Brüderle, the liberal economy minister. He wants to import qualified workers on a Canadian-style points system. Mr Seehofer is dubious. On November 3rd Mrs Merkel held an “integration summit” to talk about immigrants already in Germany. Next week the government will discuss immigration again.

Even Germans who disagree with Mr Sarrazin praise him for drawing attention to a problem. Actually he may be making the situation worse.
Some 15m people in Germany have a “migration background” (ie, immigrants or their offspring), second only to America. Some 4m are ethnic Germans from the former communist block. But many others came as guest workers in the 1950s and 1960s, especially from Turkey. On indicators of social and economic health, these migrants lag. In Bremen, where more than half the young children are from migrant stock, they are less likely to go to kindergarten than native Germans. Just 8% of foreign teenagers are in vocational training, compared with 37% of Germans. In a city struggling to recover from a slump in shipbuilding, 16.4% of migrants were unemployed in 2008, against 7.5% of native Germans. More than 40% live below the poverty line, three times the rate for non-migrants.
It is no surprise that joining the German mainstream is hard for children of manual labourers who were once expected to return home. In big cities they crowd together and go to schools from which native German children have fled, making it harder to integrate, says Stefan Luft, a scholar at the University of Bremen. Turks are especially prone to living in a parallel world because there are so many of them. For too many immigrants the dole is an acceptable alternative to work. Islam can be an additional barrier, but only for Muslims who choose to make it one. One study estimated that 10-12% of Muslims have radical Islamist leanings, and a quarter of Muslim teenagers are hostile to Christians and Jews or to democracy.

Germany awoke to such problems a decade or more before Mr Sarrazin’s screed appeared. In 2000 it opened a pathway to citizenship. Since 2005 immigrants can be required to take “integration courses,” including 600 hours of instruction in German. Spouses from poorer countries must now acquire a smattering of German before arrival. That demand angered Turks, but it has been “vital”, says Erhard Heintze, Bremen’s integration commissioner. Children are routinely tested for language competence (in Bremen at 4½).
By some measures, indeed, Germany is in good shape. The unemployment gap between foreigners and natives is narrower than elsewhere. The social polarisation that Mr Luft identifies “is not nearly as bad as in France”. The federal government has now drafted a law, long overdue, to recognise foreign credentials. Some 300,000 underemployed immigrants could then return to the professions for which they were trained. Rather than importing imams from Turkey and elsewhere the government wants them to be trained at German universities, which will impart modern values alongside religion.
The debate provoked by Mr Sarrazin has unleashed a blast of cultural warfare. The third of Germans who think the country is overrun with foreigners feel vindicated, though there is no net immigration. The majority that want the practice of Islam curtailed invoke scholarly support. The Sarrazinites are raising the bar for judging integration a success. It would be nice if immigrants developed a sentimental attachment to the Fatherland and its Leitkultur, but is it necessary? “Speaking the language and having contacts with Germans is more important than feeling German,” says Ruud Koopmans of the Social Science Research Centre in Berlin.
In Bremen the ugly turn in the debate makes it harder to achieve even scaled-back integration. Co-operation with migrants has been “massively damaged,” says Mr Heintze. Mrs Cengiz says “many families are seriously thinking about going back to Turkey.” Germany’s president, Christian Wulff, tried to undo the damage by saying that Islam “belongs to Germany”. But he is outshouted.
Bremen, a city-state, wants a climate in which such pronouncements are too obvious to be worth making. In its schools migrants are the norm, not “a small group with special needs,” says Yasemin Karakasoglu of the University of Bremen. At the city’s request she is designing a new curriculum for training teachers, which may use a child’s mother tongue when necessary and also look for new ways to educate Muslim pupils about Germany’s crimes against Jews. Germans’ idea of what it is to be German will have to change too, she thinks. Bremers may be ready for this. Most Germans, it seems, are not.