Germany’s Immigration Vulnerability
By Dr. Simon Green

Ever since it's founding, immigration has been one of the leitmotifs of the development of the Federal Republic of Germany. Covering German war refugees and ethnic Germans to labor migrants, asylum seekers, and their dependents, immigration has left few areas of German society and of course politics untouched. As such, to consider immigration as a vulnerability seems counter-intuitive: after all, Germany has had over half of a century to adapt itself to the challenges that these influxes of people, totaling almost 20 million, have presented.

But as is well known, Germany has in fact been slow to address such issues: indeed, for over forty years, a policy of what can only be termed collective self-denial was pursued under the now-notorious heading of Deutschland ist kein Einwanderungsland. The refusal of successive governments until the late 1990s to face up to the realities of immigration has created a heavy legacy for the current political elite. In this sense, it is not immigration itself which constitutes a vulnerability for Germany, but rather the political response to it.

On the contrary, immigration is rapidly emerging as a vital opportunity for Germany, due to the cumulated impact of demographic trends over the past forty years. In particular, it is the combination of increasing life expectancy with some of the lowest fertility rates of any EU country (typically around 1.4) that creates what can only be described as an existential challenge for Germany's population structure: in effect, over the coming forty years, the traditional age pyramid which existed in most European countries around 1900 is likely to become inverted, with fewer and fewer young people supporting ever increasing numbers of pensioners. Current official projections show that the size of the population of working age will shrink by almost a quarter from currently over 54 million to under 42 million by 2050; elsewhere, the United Nations has calculated that the Potential Support Ratio in Germany will halve between 1995 and 2050 from 4 to around 2. It is tempting to dismiss such scenarios as speculative, and it is true that reality can turn out to be quite different. But it is worth noting that these projections have been telling a similar story for almost thirty years and as such deserve to be taken seriously.

It would be facile to characterize immigration as a panacea to such deep-seated structural developments: in fact, other measures such as welfare reform and longer working lives are likely to be more effective. Crucially, though, these are all long-term solutions: immigration remains the only short-term measure available to a government, and other countries such as the UK have been much more proactive in actively recruiting labor to counter demographic and skills shortfalls. It is worth noting that whereas the UK's population is set to increase to 67 million by 2030 largely because of immigration and its consequences, Germany's population is projected to fall to 73 million despite the assumption of annual net immigration of 200,000 persons.

And herein lies the second challenge for Germany. For in fact, total net immigration (i.e., including German nationals) to Germany has dropped considerably in recent years, from 273,000 in 2001 to 23,000 in 2006. On current trends, Germany's population will therefore in fact fall much faster in the coming decades than was initially expected. The main reason for this has been a steady reduction in both asylum seekers and ethnic German immigrants in recent years: by 2006, these had had fallen to 21,000 and 8,000 respectively - levels not seen for twenty years. However, at the same time, Germany has not been able to attract labor migrants in any significant number. Already, the ground-breaking 'Green Card' program to recruit IT specialists filled barely more than half its quota of 20,000 work permits and the (strictly limited) possibility for high-skilled migration in the 2005 Zuwanderungsgesetz has only been taken up by a negligible number of people. The notion that Germany can easily recruit large numbers of high-skilled workers, which is implicit in much of the political debate, therefore looks seriously misplaced.

But it is the third challenge, integration, which is the trickiest of Germany's vulnerabilities in this field. For decades, German political elites walked a tightrope in terms of defining society's expectations of immigrants to adapt to German conditions: on the one hand, nobody could be forced to become 'German,' as this smacked of Nazi-style 'Germanization.' On the other hand, during the 1980s, and leaving aside the utopian vision of the Greens at this time, the majority of the population and mainstream politicians actually wanted immigrants to assimilate into German society. What emerged was a tortuous compromise of requiring high levels of cultural assimilation for citizenship, while equally asking immigrants to deliver this assimilation voluntarily. More recently, the infamous debate about Germany's Leitkultur, while ostensibly talking about integration, in fact primarily emphasized the duty of immigrants to deliver this integration. In this way, integration in Germany, probably more so than in other EU countries, has become a byword for assimilation.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this approach has been something of an ignominious failure, and today, for a variety of reasons, Germany's immigrant population is characterized by serious and persistent structural deficits in labor market outcomes, pay, housing, and especially education (1). Clearly, this constitutes a major potential vulnerability: if migrants and the indigenous population are leading progressively separate existences, with few of the shared experiences which help to forge national identities, then this puts significant pressure on the social cohesion of Germany's population. Although so far Germany has been spared race riots such as those that took place in 2005 in the Parisian banlieus, the recent death of nine Turkish-Germans in a fire in Ludwigshafen laid bare some of the latent tensions between the German and Turkish communities.

So does this mean that Germany's vulnerabilities are insuperable? Far from it. The passing of time has certainly made some of the rather ideological maxims of immigration and integration in the past seem less urgent. Thus, the political parties have become more self-assured about emphasizing the assimilatory elements of integration, as the introduction of language classes and integration and citizenship tests shows. Politically too, integration is accorded a far higher profile than in the past: North Rhine-Westphalia was the first Land to appoint a minister for integration and under the Grand Coalition, the Federal Government's integration czar has been upgraded from the Family Ministry to the Federal Chancellery. In terms of its demographic development, Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen has introduced policy innovations which are nothing short of radical in the German context. Amazingly, in all three cases, the ministers to make these changes are from the CDU, something which few observers would have predicted even ten years ago!

But much work clearly needs to be done. Integration and citizenship tests may be important for symbolic purposes, especially for the indigenous population, but they are likely to have little substantive effect. In particular, and as the PISA study showed graphically, migrants have comparatively few chances of using the education system to improve their own situation. Beyond that, Germany must learn to embrace the opportunities that labor migration brings more positively. Admittedly, this has been difficult in recent years, given the economy's protracted weakness. But a key moment is approaching in 2011, when the current seven-year transitional restrictions on free movement of labor from the 2004 accession countries expire.

Addressing these issues will be a central challenge for any government. Indeed, by opening up the structures of society to migrants and their descendants, Germany would draw the logical consequence of the far-reaching changes to its population that have taken place: at an estimated 13 percent in 2005, the percentage foreign-born population of Germany now even exceeds that of the United States (11.7 percent in 2003).

Footnotes:

1. See also Rethinking Immigrant Integration in Germany, AICGS Advisor, 21 December 2006.

This essay is the result of an AICGS conference on "German Vulnerabilities in a Globalizing World," which was held in March 2008 with the generous support of the National Intelligence Council, the University of Birmingham, Deutsche Lufthansa AG, and the International Association for the Study of German Politics (IASGP). For more about the conference, please click here.

Dr. Simon Green is Professor of Politics at Aston University, UK and a regular contributor to the Advisor.

This essay appeared in the July 25, 2008, AICGS Advisor.