Germany - Immigration
Germany is a prime destination for political and economic refugees from many developing countries. An ethnic Danish minority lives in the north, and a small Slavic minority known as the Sorbs lives in eastern Germany. Due to restrictive German citizenship laws, most "foreigners" do not hold German citizenship even when born and raised in Germany. However, since the German government undertook citizenship and immigration law reforms in 2002, more foreign residents have had the ability to naturalize.
In 1913 a united Germany adopted a very different vision of citizenship from that of the United States. In Germany, it wasn’t geography that mattered but “blood,” and culture. That is to say, Germany granted citizenship to people who could prove they had German parents, grandparents or any kind of ethnic German roots. However, it did not create provisions for naturalization. To put this in concrete terms, a 16-year-old girl born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1910 whose grandparents had emigrated from Germany 60 years before could apply and get German citizenship. On the other hand, a Polish steelworker who had been working in German mines for 30 years could not.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote [Volume Two - Chapter III: Subjects and Citizens] that "At present there exists one State which manifests at least some modest attempts that show a better appreciation of how things ought to be done in this matter. It is not, however, in our model German Republic but in the U.S.A. that efforts are made to conform at least partly to the counsels of commonsense. By refusing immigrants to enter there if they are in a bad state of health, and by excluding certain races from the right to become naturalized as citizens, they have begun to introduce principles similar to those on which we wish to ground the People's State."
Like other parts of Europe in the 19th century, until the completion of German unification in 1871, more people left Germany than entered the region. Millions left their homeland to seek employment either in agriculture or industry in North America, South America, and Australia. Over 51 million Americans have some German ancestry or approximately 17% of the United States population.
But the explosion of the Industrial Revolution at the very end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century changed Germany forever. The new mines, mills, factories and towns of the unified German Empire required labor. And so, laborers came. At first, large numbers of Polish workers were imported to work in steel mills and iron mines. The next wave of foreign workers, several million, was able-bodied men from Nazi Germany’s occupied territories who were forced to work in the German heavy manufacturing sector during World War II. Of course, these people never considered themselves immigrants.
Germany’s loss in World War II brought two waves of true immigrants flowing into the country. The first wave (1945-1949) included Germans who had lived in territories that were previously German (such as East Prussia or Silesia) and had been annexed by other countries (such as Poland). An estimated 12 million people arrived and settled in both East and West Germany. The second wave included East Germans who fled west between 1949 and the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. This group was approximately 3.8 million people. A new group consisted of the many people of German ancestry who had left in the centuries before and now faced persecution in some of the countries. Among these groups were so-called “Russian or Polish Germans.” Between 1950 and 1987 approximately 1.4 million arrived; between 1988 and 2005 another 3 million immigrated to Germany.
Another group came with the explosion in the German economy in the 1950s, which generated a huge demand for labor. Foreigners entered the country to work in mines and factories. Most significantly, many of the “Guest Workers” (Gastarbeiter) came from Turkey. For the first time, Germany experienced an influx of people who were Muslim.
The German government that recruited foreign workers did not intend for them to stay in the country indefinitely. In fact, the bilateral recruitment agreements that Germany signed with Italy (1955), Spain (1960), Greece (1960), Turkey (1961), Portugal (1964), and Yugoslavia (1968), required that the “Guest Workers” were to come to Germany without their families for a period of only two years. Extensive plans were not made to assimilate the gastarbeiter [“Guest Workers,” or to make them citizens. They were called Ausländer (“foreigners”) and were expected to remain so.
However, things did not go as planned. In 1960, the number of foreigners was 686,000, or 1.2 percent of the total German population. The most populous of the so-called Ausländer were Italians. After the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, foreigners increased in terms of both numbers and their share of the labor force. The number of foreigners quickly jumped to four million, and their share of the population reached 6.7 percent of Germany’s total population. By 1973, the most important country of origin was no longer Italy but rather Turkey, which accounted for 23 percent of all foreigners. Other countries of origin included Yugoslavia (17 percent), Italy (16 percent), Greece (10 percent), and Spain (7 percent).
More importantly, a significant change had occurred in the behavior of the workers. By the 1970s, many of the “foreigners” had sent for their wives and families. Moreover, a new generation of theoretically non-German children was born in Germany in the 1960s. The “Guest Workers” had made Germany home.
The demand for foreign workers subsided in 1973 when Germany entered a period of economic recession as a result of the oil crisis. The government banned the recruitment of foreign workers and began to grapple with its large migrant population. In 1988, the 4.5 million foreigners in Germany accounted for 7.3 percent of the population as a whole. Some 1.6 million of them were wage- and salary-earners; another 140,000 were self-employed.
But even though recruitment subsided for a while, periods of economic growth attracted even more immigrants. Second and third generations of children added to the number of “immigrants into Germany.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites, Jews from this area were allowed to immigrate to Germany because of discrimination in their home countries. In addition, many Auslandsdeutsche or Spätaussiedler (emigrants) also “returned” to Germany. Some spoke German; many did not. Besides these groups, refugees from former Yugoslavia entered Germany.
Since the 1960s, East Germany also called for foreign workers, so-called Vertragsarbeiter (Contract Workers). For this purpose, the GDR signed agreements with other socialist countries, among them Poland (1965), Hungary (1967), Mozambique (1979) and Vietnam (1980). In the beginning, apprenticeship programs and further education were the focus. Later on, the aim of the recruitment was to deal with a labor shortage. But unlike West Germany, East Germany paid much attention to limiting the time of foreigners working in the country. Integration into society was discouraged. By the end of 1989, approximately 190,000 foreigners were living in the GDR. Among them were about 90,000 contract workers. Of these, 60,000 were from Vietnam.
In 2003, the number of legally resident foreigners in Germany was 7.3 million, which comprised 8.9 percent of the total population. This was, by far, the greatest percentage in the history of the country. Even though Germany was not seen as a nation of immigrants, its non-citizen population was comparable to that of the United States of America. And the largest group was the 1.9 million Turkish citizens, of whom 654,000 were born in Germany. About 25 percent of the total foreign population was from countries of the European Union, and an additional 55 percent came from other western and eastern European countries like Norway, Switzerland, Russia, Ukraine, and Hungary. Overall, 80 percent of the foreigners came from Europe, while almost 12 percent were Asians. Now, Germany faced the problem of what to do with its new population.
By 2000, Germany had become a very different place. More than seven million people now lived in Germany who had not been born there. But the situation was even more complex for those born in Germany of foreigners; these people had been born in Germany, grown up in Germany, never lived anywhere but Germany, spoke German as their first language and had no plans to leave Germany. And yet, by law, they could not become German citizens. No matter the degree of their “German-ness,” they were still officially Ausländer.
In 1999, the German Government, led by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, a member of the Social Democratic political party, rewrote the terms of German citizenship. Declaring, “Germany is an immigrant nation,” Schroeder made it possible for foreigners and the children of foreigners living in Germany to become citizens.
The right to asylum is guaranteed under Article 16a of Germany's constitution — the Basic Law — and was drafted for unique historic reasons. The constitutional guarantee — written into German law partly as a result of Nazi crimes against Germans and non-Germans before and during World War II — applies to all "politically persecuted" individuals. Although the right to asylum remains intact for legitimate victims of political persecution, restrictions on the countries of origin and entry introduced in 1993 have steadily reduced the number of those seeking asylum to a 20-year low of 50,500 in 2003.
A new immigration law that took effect on January 1, 2005, promotes a more open immigration policy, particularly for highly skilled workers. The law also extends the right to asylum to the victims of genital mutilation and sexual abuse and political persecution by non-European Union groups. In 2007 Germany’s net migration rate was estimated to be 2.18 migrants per 1,000 people, placing Germany forty-second in the world in inbound migration, the same level experienced by the United Kingdom.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2015 famously welcomed refugees to Germany who had fled war in their homeland, especially those coming from Syria. That year, nearly 900,000 irregular migrants entered the country in what would be dubbed a migration crisis. The chancellor said that slamming the door shut "in the Internet era of the 21st century is an illusion." Germany has so far taken in more refugees than any other of the 28 EU member states this year and is expected the see an estimated 1.5 million asylum seekers cross its borders before the end of 2015.
In 2016, net migration amounted to some 500,000, while in 2015 — the year when the bulk of asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa arrived in Germany — it spiked at 1,140,000. In 2017, net migration to Germany dropped by around one-fifth year-on-year to about 416,000, the Federal Office for Statistics (Destatis) said on 15 October 2018. In published figures, the agency noted that net migration from Asia and Africa had decreased, in line with a downward trend seen in 2016. Migrants arriving from Syria dropped from 146,000 in 2016 to 60,000 in 2017. One of the largest decreases was also seen in migrants arriving from Afghanistan. That figure dropped from 56,000 in 2016 to 4,000.
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