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Jewish World Review Oct. 11, 2007 / 29 Tishrei 5768 Germany's Turks provide a lesson on immigration By Jonathan V. Last
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Immigration reform has fallen off the public agenda, for now. It's just as well. For wealthy, prosperous countries, immigration is not a problem to be fixed; it is a continuing condition to be continually managed. So as we move the topic to the back of the brain to percolate, let's remember that immigration is a global concern. Things are tough all over. Consider the case of Germany. Germany, a country of 82 million, has 3.5 million Muslims, the second-largest Muslim population in Europe. Almost all of them are immigrants, and three-quarters are from a single country: Turkey. The story of Turkish immigration to Germany begins in 1961. West Germany was finally experiencing a postwar boom and found itself in need of additional workers to keep pace with the economy. The country signed a bilateral agreement with Turkey to allow German companies to hire Turks as "guest workers" for what was supposed to be largely seasonal employment. In seven years, the number of Turks in Germany rose from 6,800 to 205,000. In 1973, the guest-worker program was ended and there were 910,000 Turks living in Germany. Contrary to the plan, however, the guest workers had settled in and declined to return to Turkey. Dismayed, the government offered them cash to go home (2,000 Deutschmarks per adult, equal at the time to about $1,000), but few accepted. In 1980, a German court ruled that the guest workers had a right to be reunited in Germany with spouses who lived in Turkey, opening the door to more Turks. A year later, Germany's Turkish population had swelled to 1.5 million. And this really was Germany's Turkish population. At the time, Germany did not easily allow dual citizenship and did not grant citizenship automatically to people born on its soil. Naturalization also was a difficult process, requiring a 15-year waiting period for adults. It could well happen that a child born in Germany, to German-born parents who happened to be children of Turkish guest workers, would hold Turkish citizenship and be classed as a guest worker. With no mechanism to expel these residents and no good way to integrate them, Germany was stuck with an uncomfortable status quo. The chief source of unease was that the immigrant class in question was Muslim. German society had a not-unreasonable concern over Muslim immigrants that it would not have had if the immigrants had been Buddhist or Wiccan because Buddhism and Wicca are not intrinsically political, and potentially irredentist, faiths. In the intervening years, Germany has had its share of Islamic tensions. In 2003, a Muslim teacher won a legal fight to wear a head scarf in the classroom, even though it contradicted Germany's constitutional mandate for religious neutrality. Worse, there have been a number of Muslim terrorist encounters: In 2002, a group of men in the Ruhr valley were caught plotting to attack Jews in Berlin; in 2004, three Ansar al-Islam members were arrested for allegedly planning the assassination of Iraqi politician Ayad Allawi during his visit to Germany; in 2006, a Muslim student was arrested for allegedly plotting a bombing attack in Cologne. But while these incidents - understandably - made Germans nervous, none of them involved Turkish Muslims. While Muslims of Arab or African origin make up only a tiny part of Germany's Muslim population, they account for most of the cases of Islamic-German conflict. Not all of them, of course: A bomb plot broken up in September involved at least one Turkish national. But as Jonathan Laurence of Boston College noted in his report for the International Crisis Group, "Islam and Identity in Germany", Islamist activism "appears to be confined to the non-Turkish Muslim element." As it turns out, German Turks aren't even particularly religious: Government estimates put the number who attend mosque somewhere between 10 percent and 20 percent. And unlike other European countries, such as England and France, where Saudi-exported Wahhabi extremism has festered, the Islamic religious space in Germany is taken up mostly by the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs, which is an extension of the secularist Turkish state. The German government estimates that the country has 28 radical Islamist groups with only about 32,000 members, few of whom are Turks. If anything, Germany's Turks are something of a blessing: They are not only peaceable and reasonably secularist, but also fruitful. The native fertility rate for German women is a deathly 1.35 (remember, the replacement rate is 2.1). Turkish women in Germany have a healthy fertility rate of 2.3 births per woman. The country needs those babies. Without them, the German welfare state eventually will collapse, with too many pensioners and not enough workers. (It may do so anyway, but Turkish fertility can push back that horizon.) But despite changing its citizenship laws in 2000 to give temporary citizenship to children born in Germany (if one parent has been living there for more than five years), the country has not yet figured out how to integrate and/or assimilate its Turkish population. On the whole, it is a problem that vexes Germans at least as much as illegal immigration does Americans. There are lessons here for the United States. First and most glaring: There is no one-size-fits-all answer to problems with immigration. Historical circumstances matter. Lesson Two: Crucial differences may exist among subsets of demographic groups. Where one type of Islam might pose an existential cultural conflict with Western liberalism; other types do not. A third lesson, mostly lost in our debate: Sometimes problems carry hidden virtues. And vice versa.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Jonathan V. Last is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Comment by clicking here.
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