ICYMI: Germany: Where the refugee flood is a solution, not a problem

2015/05/26 Leave a comment

Refugees as part of an economic immigration strategy:

Unlike Canada, where refugees are mainly sponsored by families and charities, the German government sorts and disperses its asylum seekers: Towns and cities with the strongest economies get the most. This week, Chancellor Angela Merkel pressed the 27 other European Union countries to imitate this system internationally. The response, so far, has been chilly.

In Germany, by contrast, the public and their politicians are receiving the majority of Europe’s refugees with surprising calm, even optimism. While there was a brief flare-up of anti-immigrant politics earlier this year in cities of the former East Germany (where there are almost no immigrants to be found), those died away quickly. Here, even refugee advocates say they’re surprised by the broadly positive reception.

“I am really amazed at how much this country has changed – even a decade ago this would have created anger and distrust, but today I’m hearing nothing but welcome for the new refugees – people are being really open,” says Zerai Kiros Abraham, a former Eritrean refugee who now runs Project Moses, a refugee-settlement charity in Frankfurt.

Olaf Cunitz, the vice-mayor of Frankfurt responsible for planning and housing, says that the refugees are being seen by many Germans not as a problem but as a solution. “What’s unusual is that here in Frankfurt, people are very, very open to the topic of refugees,” he says. “At the moment, we don’t have any resistance, in any neighbourhood, to the settlement of refugees. People say ‘We need new people, they need our help. We’re a wealthy city, we can handle this.’”

Nowhere is this attitude more visible than in the rural town of Gelnhausen, to the east of Frankfurt, where town officials are hoping that the 2,500 refugees they will receive this year will be just the thing for their aging, fast-shrinking work force. They particularly want the Syrians, who tend to be middle-class and have the professional degrees and technical skills needed here.

“The good thing about the refugees is that they’re here – we don’t have to go out to their communities to get them,” says Susanne Simmler, head of the regional council. “We have labour shortages and demographic changes here, so we need new people – and a rural region like this normally does not attract immigrants.”

Germany: Where the refugee flood is a solution, not a problem – The Globe and Mail.

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Germany adds Jews to anti-Semitism watchdog after criticism

2015/05/23 Leave a comment

Corrective action.

One could not imagine having a group discussing bias and prejudice against Blacks without Black representation, anti-Muslim prejudice without Muslims, nor antisemitism without any Jews.

But conversely, only having representatives from the community under threat undermines the objective of  improving wider public understanding across society and thus influencing public debate:

The German federal government announced on Thursday that its anti-Semitism committee would be adding two Jewish members to its ranks, following criticism for not having done so at its inception. A statement from the government said that Interior Minister Thomas de Maizère (CDU) had invited the psychologist Marina Chernivsky to join, as well as Andreas Nachama, director of the Topography of Terror Foundation, the organization which operates Berlin’s museum on Nazi era.

The current incarnation of the anti-Semitism commission began work in December 2014, when de Maizère called for the creation of a group of experts to “resolutely combat anti-Semitism and continue promoting the sustainability of Jewish life in Germany.” The group had its first meeting in January of the year, and to the dismay of many Jewish groups, did not have a single member with a Jewish background.

Members of the group included Klaus Holz, the secretary general of the Evangelical Academy, Patrick Siegele, who runs the Berlin branch of the Anne Frank Center, and Juliane Wetzel, a historian at the Center for Anti-Semitism Research – but none of them are actually Jewish.

The sharpest critique came from Julius Schoeps, Director of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European Jewish Studies, who called it an “unrivaled scandal” on the part of the government.

Germany adds Jews to anti-Semitism watchdog after criticism | News | DW.DE | 21.05.2015.

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After Students Went To Wage Jihad, Teacher Highlights Youth Radicalization

2015/03/28 Leave a comment

Interesting interview with Lamya Kaddor, a German-Syrian religious studies teacher and expert on Islam, who teaches Islamic studies in Germany and who wrote a book Zum Toeten Bereit (Ready To Kill), about her experience having some of her former students joining jihadi groups in Syria

On why her students left Germany for jihadist groups

There’s a very simple reason. They were radicalized, they were ideologized, they were manipulated. The question behind it that I find way more important is: Why can these young people be manipulated this way? There are very difficult conditions in Germany, one being that Germany does not understand itself as an immigrant nation, even though it is at this point. But being German is still defined somewhat by descendance — how many generations do you go back as a German with a German lifestyle.

Number two is Islamophobia. It’s gone so far that in Germany every second German will say he or she has an issue with Muslims. And those are scary figures. There is still a discrepancy between being German and Muslim. You can’t be both. You’re either German or you’re Muslim. There’s no concept of being German and Muslim — and not just for the majority of the Germans, but also for the Muslims themselves. They don’t think these are two concepts that can be reconciled.

On why four of the five quickly returned to Germany

They wanted to come back. It was very difficult to get them back. They were extremely embarrassed. They could barely look me in the eye. They told me that in the beginning, they weren’t even sure if they were in Turkey or already in Syria. They weren’t aware of the border crossing. Some said they were even blindfolded.

As soon as they got there, they realized that that’s something they can’t do, they don’t want to do. And that it was not at all what they had been told beforehand.

On Kaddor’s former student who stayed in Syria

He actually took his wife with him and his newborn daughter. One of the ones who returned is actually his brother and he is in contact with him. And so he seems to be staying there and living there. … I believe that he is fighting.

On how this experience has affected the way she teaches

I have become more aware, more sensitive. If someone comes up and starts talking about good and evil, about what should be done with the unfaithful, I’m listening. And I’m paying a lot more attention when these kinds of things come up.

After Students Went To Wage Jihad, Teacher Highlights Youth Radicalization : NPR.

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Germany reverses ban on headscarves for Muslim teachers

2015/03/14 Leave a comment

Progress even if some dissent:

The court in Karlsruhe, ruling on a case brought by a Muslim woman blocked from a teaching job because of her headscarf, said religious symbols could only be banned when they posed “not just an abstract but a concrete risk of disruption in schools.”

“This is a good day for religious freedom,” said Volker Beck, a lawmaker from the opposition Greens.

He argued that headgear worn by devout Muslim, Jewish and Christian women and men was less of a threat to German society than “opponents of diversity” such as the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), neo-Nazis and extremist Muslim Salafists.

Christine Lueders, head of the federal anti-discrimination agency, hailed the ruling for “reinforcing religious freedom in Germany.” With education administered by Germany’s 16 states, she called on local authorities to review the relevant rules.

But the German Teachers’ Assocation (DL) called the ruling “problematic,” saying it undermined the principle of political and religious “neutrality” in schools and public services.

“We fear this ruling could lead to disruption in certain schools if, for example, non-Muslim parents do not agree with their children being taught by teachers in headscarves,” said Josef Kraus, president of the teachers’ body.

Germany reverses ban on headscarves for Muslim teachers – The Globe and Mail.

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Germany looks to Canadian model for immigration policy inspiration

2015/03/11 Leave a comment

More on the debates within Germany and how Canada continues to be looked at as a model – even as the model changes:

For Germany, the debate over how to manage immigration is critical to its future. The country is facing a demographic chasm as the population ages and families shrink. The working-age population will contract by nearly seven million over the next 10 years, according to the proposal by the Social Democrats. Businesses are already complaining about the difficulty of finding highly skilled employees.

For now, Germany is benefiting from a stroke of luck, say immigration experts. As the strongest major economy in the region, it has drawn in skilled workers seeking opportunity from the rest of the 28-member European Union. But if other major European economies start to rebound, such flows will diminish. And that means Germany will have to look beyond the EU for future sources of immigrant talent.

In recent years, Germany has become the second-most popular destination for immigrants worldwide behind the U.S. The country absorbed 437,000 immigrants in 2013, the highest such total in more than 20 years. That figure continued to climb in the first six months of 2014, according to the latest available statistics from the German government.

Yet there is a sense in Germany that the country’s approach to immigration is neither transparent nor efficient. Most new arrivals come from other EU countries, whose citizens face no restrictions on entering Germany or working there. The number of refugees flowing into the country is also rising. Last year the number of new applications for asylum jumped nearly 60 per cent from 2013 to 173,000.

“There is a feeling that the system we have now is not satisfactory,” said Orkan Koesemen, a migration expert at the Bertelsmann Foundation. But the talk of adopting a point system similar to the one in Canada is less about the policy merits than about sending a message, he said. People believe a points-based approach is the equivalent of “let’s select the best and the ones we want.”

While a majority of Germans say they embrace diversity, immigration remains a sensitive topic. A poll released last month by the European Commission found that 61 per cent of Germans held negative views of immigration from non-EU countries. One new way of expressing that unease came in the form of Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West – or PEGIDA, after its German acronym – a previously unknown right-wing movement that began drawing thousands to its weekly demonstrations.

Looking to Canada, German politicians see an immigration system that is open about its priorities, attracts a large pool of qualified applicants and, most importantly, enjoys widespread domestic support. When the Harper government raised the quota for immigration to Canada for 2015, for instance, it caused barely a ripple.

The Social Democrats, the junior partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government, have formally proposed adopting a points-based system for would-be immigrants. A group of young legislators within Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party have also voiced support for such a system, as have the Greens, with some variants. Even a new, conservative euro skeptic party, Alternative for Democracy, says it endorses the Canadian approach. (The far left party in Germany’s parliament, however, rejects it.)

Ms. Merkel reacted coolly to the latest plan, calling the issue of refugee flows more urgent than immigration. And Thomas de Maiziere, the Interior Minister, said the questions raised by the proposal could be addressed with existing laws.

A council of migration experts has asserted that Germany doesn’t actually need a points system like the one Canada has. There is already a way for highly skilled workers from non-EU countries to immigrate, through what’s known as the EU’s “Blue Card” program. Plus, since 2012, the council noted, Germany has relaxed some of its rules: For instance, the country now allows certain kinds of immigrants to enter and search for employment, rather than requiring a job offer ahead of time.

What Germany does need, experts say, is a more welcoming image. To that end, an overhaul of Germany’s immigration law might be a good idea. “I think it’s needed for symbolic reasons, not for factual reasons,” said Christian Joppke, an expert on comparative immigration at the University of Bern. He noted that Germany’s last major legislation in this area, which came into effect in 2005, is officially entitled the Act to Control and Restrict Migration.

Prof. Joppke added that Canada’s government has actually moved its policy a little more in the direction of Germany by placing more emphasis on whether would-be immigrants have job offers.

Germany looks to Canadian model for immigration policy inspiration – The Globe and Mail.

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Kenan Malik | Why Multiculturalism Failed

2015/02/19 Leave a comment

While his understanding of multiculturalism is driven by the diverse European approaches to living with diversity, and unfairly, at least from the Canadian perspective, multiculturalism as reinforcing differences rather than being an instrument to further integration and participation.

But his three concluding points are valid, as is of course the reminder that integration happens at the local and individual levels:

First, Europe should separate diversity as a lived experience from multiculturalism as a political process. The experience of living in a society made diverse by mass immigration should be welcomed. Attempts to institutionalize such diversity through the formal recognition of cultural differences should be resisted.

Second, Europe should distinguish colorblindness from blindness to racism. The assimilationist resolve to treat everyone equally as citizens, rather than as bearers of specific racial or cultural histories, is valuable. But that does not mean that the state should ignore discrimination against particular groups. Citizenship has no meaning if different classes of citizens are treated differently, whether because of multicultural policies or because of racism.

Finally, Europe should differentiate between peoples and values. Multiculturalists argue that societal diversity erodes the possibility of common values. Similarly, assimilationists suggest that such values are possible only within a more culturally—and, for some, ethnically—homogeneous society. Both regard minority communities as homogeneous wholes, attached to a particular set of cultural traits, faiths, beliefs, and values, rather than as constituent parts of a modern democracy.

The real debate should be not between multiculturalism and assimilationism but between two forms of the former and two forms of the latter. An ideal policy would marry multiculturalism’s embrace of actual diversity, rather than its tendency to institutionalize differences, and assimilationism’s resolve to treat everyone as citizens, rather than its tendency to construct a national identity by characterizing certain groups as alien to the nation. In practice, European countries have done the opposite. They have enacted either multicultural policies that place communities in constricting boxes or assimilationist ones that distance minorities from the mainstream.

Moving forward, Europe must rediscover a progressive sense of universal values, something that the continent’s liberals have largely abandoned, albeit in different ways. On the one hand, there is a section of the left that has combined relativism and multiculturalism, arguing that the very notion of universal values is in some sense racist. On the other, there are those, exemplified by such French assimilationists as the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who insist on upholding traditional Enlightenment values but who do so in a tribal fashion that presumes a clash of civilizations.

There has also been a guiding assumption throughout Europe that immigration and integration must be managed through state policies and institutions. Yet real integration, whether of immigrants or of indigenous groups, is rarely brought about by the actions of the state; it is shaped primarily by civil society, by the individual bonds that people form with one another, and by the organizations they establish to further their shared political and social interests. It is the erosion of such bonds and institutions that has proved so problematic—that links assimilationist policy failures to multicultural ones and that explains why social disengagement is a feature not simply of immigrant communities but of the wider society, too. To repair the damage that disengagement has done, and to revive a progressive universalism, Europe needs not so much new state policies as a renewal of civil society.

Kenan Malik | Why Multiculturalism Failed | Foreign Affairs.

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Germany’s xenophobic anti-Islam movement shocked the world. Then, it defeated itself

2015/02/12 Leave a comment

Good analysis of why Pegida has become weak:

Only a few weeks ago, Germany’s Pegida movement attracted tens of thousands of supporters every Monday and was on its way to become a political power.

Then, however, things started to go poorly for the German anti-Muslim protesters.

Authorities canceled one of the marches due to a terror threat, briefly after the attacks in Paris. Then, it was revealed that Pegida’s leader, Lutz Bachmann, had posed as Hitler. Bachmann said he would resign, but then he changed his mind. Instead, Pegida’s more moderate organizers left in protest and founded a new, more moderate movement that has so far failed to attract substantial support.

By Feb. 9, the number of Pegida supporters in Dresden had dropped from 25,000 (Jan. 12) to 2,000. Monday’s march could mark the beginning of the end of a movement that shocked domestic and foreign observers with its loud, anti-Islam message, but also with the more hidden, xenophobic and sometimes openly racist remarks of its supporters.

Why did Pegida lose so many supporters so quickly?

1. Infighting within Pegida’s leadership.

2. National opposition was too strong, and the gains of the movement were minimal.

3. Many Pegida supporters wanted to voice local criticism, and were shocked when they found themselves on international front pages.

4. Similar, smaller protest marches in other cities failed.

5. The protesters could not agree on a common agenda.

6. Furthermore, neo-Nazis dominated several Pegida offshoots.

Germany’s xenophobic anti-Islam movement shocked the world. Then, it defeated itself. – The Washington Post.

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Jewish groups criticise German panel on antiSemitism

2015/02/12 Leave a comment

Does seem a bit odd – but it also depends on the experts selected:

Jewish groups have strongly criticised the German government for creating a commission to tackle anti-Semitism that does not include a single Jew.

A spokesman for the Moses Mendelssohn Centre for European-Jewish Studies in Germany said it was a “scandal”.

The centre announced on Tuesday that it was creating a rival panel of experts.

Germany’s interior ministry set up the independent commission to fight anti-Semitism and support Jewish life.

A spokeswoman for the ministry told The Associated Press news agency that the question of religious affiliation was not part of the panel’s selection process.

Anetta Kahane from the Amadeu Antonio Foundation criticised the decision. “Nobody would even think of creating a conference on hatred of Islam without Muslims or a round table on the discrimination of women without women,” she said.

The Moses Mendelssohn Centre announced that it, along with two other leading Jewish groups, would be creating an alternative commission.

Spokesman Julius Schoeps said that they would include both Jewish and non-Jewish experts on the panel.

The group of eight experts appointed by Germany’s interior ministry are due to submit a report to parliament within two years that will be the basis for a discussion on how to tackle anti-Semitism.

BBC News – Jewish groups criticise German panel on anti-Semitism.

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Multiculturalism Is Not Dead

2015/02/02 Leave a comment

Rumours of the death of multiculturalism and related policies are exaggerated according to this recent European study:

Countries will create formal policies for citizenship and declare the issue resolved, but that does not mean citizenship is really possible. The authors found that, even in countries such as Denmark and Germany where multiculturalism was never formally adopted, some public policies were being developed to recognize minority communities and facilitate their participation in the labor market, educational systems and other key social sectors at local and national levels.  Europeans love to insist that Americans should just give amnesty to people who got into the United States illegally but they won’t even give citizenship to their legal residents.

In countries where some multiculturalism has formally been adopted, such as the UK and the Netherlands, the picture was more mixed but showed that newer approaches, such as civic integration – including citizenship education, naturalization ceremonies and language classes – also built on and developed multiculturalism rather than erasing it. National identities have been remade in light of it – players of Indian descent can even get on the British cricket team now.

Dr. Nasar Meer, a Reader in Comparative Social Policy and Citizenship at the University of Strathclyde, lead author of the paper, said, “As European societies have become more diverse, the task of developing an inclusive citizenship has become increasingly important. In recent years, however, there has been a backlash against multiculturalism as path to achieving this.

“The reasons for this include the way that, in some countries, multiculturalism is seen to have facilitated social fragmentation and entrenched social divisions, while for others, it has distracted attention away from socio-economic disparities or encouraged a moral hesitancy amongst ‘native’ populations. Some have even blamed it for incidents of international terrorism.”

Dr. Daniel Faas, of Trinity College Dublin’s Department of Sociology, a co-author of the research, said, “Legislations have become more inclusive of diversity, and the large anti-far right demonstrations highlight the solidarity with migrants, but also show that multiculturalism is a fragile concept there.”

Meer added, “Our study clearly shows that, where there have been advances in policies of multiculturalism, these have not been repealed uniformly, or on occasion not at all, but may equally have been supplemented by being ‘balanced out’ in, or thickened by, civic integrationist approaches.”

Reinforces the Kymlicka analysis of the ongoing multicultural integration policies being implemented.

Multiculturalism Is Not Dead.

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Rock concert, rallies overwhelm Germany’s anti-Islam group | Merkel Comments

2015/01/28 Leave a comment

Merkel is remarkably consistent in her language against all forms of antisemitism and all forms of racism. Canadian politicians, in their legitimate attention to antisemitism, have largely forgotten the broader anti-racism message:

Earlier on Monday, on the eve of Tuesday’s 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germans had an everlasting responsibility to fight anti-Semitism and all forms of racism.

In what appeared to be an indirect reference to PEGIDA, Merkel told a memorial for the victims of Auschwitz: “We’ve got to fight anti-Semitism and all racism from the outset.”

“We’ve got to constantly be on guard to protect our freedom, democracy and rule of law,” she said. “We’ve got to expose those who promote prejudices and conjure up bogeymen, the old ones as well as the new.”

Merkel said it was a disgrace that some Jews or those expressing support for Israel had been threatened or attacked in Germany, which was responsible for the Holocaust, and that protecting the growing Jewish community was a national duty.

Rock concert, rallies overwhelm Germany’s anti-Islam group | Reuters.

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