It’s early August in the Imperial Hall of the Römer, Frankfurt-am-Main’s city hall for over 600 years. In centuries past, magnificent coronation banquets were celebrated here after the election of a new Holy Roman Emperor. Today, 300 citizens of Frankfurt have accepted an invitation from the city’s Integration Officer, Nargess Eskandari Grünberg. They are also celebrating a decision, but a civic one through and through. All these women and men have become German citizens over the past few months. A big step for some, a pragmatic one for others. The city counsellor, who herself has Iranian roots, paid tribute to their decision. A “sign of confidence in Germany,” she called it. “I have found my new home here,” says IT consultant Jean Zecchinel. He was born in Brazil, has been living in Germany for nine years and wants to stay. So why shouldn’t he also become a German? “Many things will become much easier for me,” hopes Yanjun Ying; she comes from China and has studied architecture in Germany. A total of 113,000 foreigners were naturalized in Germany in 2007 – like these two people this year. Most of them – over a quarter – have Turkish roots.
Statistics define these “new” Germans – along with all those who have immigrated since 1950 and their descendants – as “people with an immigrant background”. The Federal Statistical Office has counted a total of 15.1 million people with an immigrant background in Germany, about a fifth of the population, and the trend is rising. Incidentally, foreigners make up fewer than half of them; German nationals are in the majority, totalling 7.9 million. This is a large, growing group which is having a growing impact on the face of German society, shaping and changing it. “Of course I’m German. And it’s just as obvious that I come from Turkey and live the way I see fit,” writes journalist Birand Bingül in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit: the “either-or days are over.”
A priority subject in politics
The term “immigrant background” is unwieldy, and news presenter Dunja Hayali, who has Iraqi parents, is not the only one who dislikes it intensely. “For weeks I’ve been thinking about how we might express it in a better way – but I haven’t come up with anything yet,” she said recently in an interview with Multikulti Radio Berlin. People from immigrant families? People with non-German roots? Maybe. Whatever you think about it, the term “immigrant background” can be heard very frequently in the German media because the integration issue has become increasingly topical in recent years. Today it’s one of the priorities of domestic policy – having been ignored for far too many years. After all, people have been immigrating to Germany since the late 1950s.
There are many schools in which migrant children with poor German skills make up the majority, even reaching 100 percent in some cases. Many immigrants have unresolved issues about their own identity, about belonging, about being accepted as a German of immigrant origin, and about how open German society is for immigrants. There are discussions about values and about head scarves. There are whole streets where all the satellite dishes point towards Turkish TV stations, because German news either doesn’t interest the people or wouldn’t be understood anyway. There is discrimination against migrants in everyday life: subtle, niggling undercurrents and outrageous examples that really hurt. As a general rule there is much coexistence between immigrants and Germans, but little togetherness. Of course, everything is not black and white, nuances prevail. And some of the same problems occur in all immigration countries. But nobody denies that the integration of immigrants remains an unresolved political and social task.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has convened two integration summits up to now. These led to a National Integration Plan with more than 400 concrete measures including language and integration courses, cultural and sports projects. Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble holds regular discussions in the German Islamic Conference with representatives of the third-largest religious community in Germany after the two Christian religions. Great efforts are being made, but up to now they have not had any impact on the statistics. For example, the latest “Report on the Situation of Foreigners”, published by the Integration Commissioner of the Federal Government, comes to the conclusion that the participation of children and adolescents from immigrant families in education declines, the higher you get in the system. In figures, this means that 40 percent of all young people with a foreign passport have no vocational training, and only eight per cent manage their Abitur (Germany’s top secondary-school-leaving certificate, required for university admission). The highest proportion of adults with no job qualifications is 72 percent – among men and women of Turkish origin.
Successful migrants
Yet language skills and education in particular are key ways of gaining a feeling of belonging, for success in a career: in short, for integration. There are many success stories about foreigners and Germans from immigrant families – and in most cases their training and an excellent command of German have played a key role. You don’t have to look far to find women and men with an immigrant background occupying prominent positions in German society – above all in culture, the media, politics and sports. In November Cem Özdemir is expected to become the first person from an immigrant family to be elected leader of a political party. The new leader-designate of the Green Party likes to describe himself as a “Swabian from Anatolia”. And a German of Turkish origin became a member of the CDU’s National Executive Board in 2004. Emine Demirbüken-Wegner, MP from Berlin, was born in Turkey in 1961. In the creative industries in particular there are many singers, actresses, journalists, presenters, filmmakers, writers and comedians. Up to now, however, the number of people of non-German origin who have been successful in everyday careers has only been growing slowly. Women managers like Milagros Caina-Lindemann, who came to Germany at the age of four with her Spanish parents, and businessmen like Bulent Uzuner, whose father worked as a welder in a shipyard in Bremen, are role models. Caina-Lindemann made it to the Board of a company listed on the M-Dax stock exchange and is now Head of Group Executives at Deutsche Bahn. Uzuner runs a successful software business with 1100 employees.
The Berlin-based sociologist Ulrich Raiser has studied successful migrants – focusing not on their celebrity status, but on good training in the German education system. He comes to the conclusion that the decisive success factor was their parents, who gave their children a motivation to become something special in life. However, the biggest group of immigrants – from Turkey – stem mostly from “uneducated classes” in which such an attitude cannot be taken for granted. Furthermore, politics and society have provided too little encouragement and support, and left too much to chance.
Efforts must focus on education and training
Many professionally successful women and men with an immigrant background are annoyed when they see the media focusing on negative images of “integration losers”. As trainee lawyer Gülperi Atalay (26) from Berlin says: “Normal people like me are ignored. […] And some Turkish families have the attitude that girls don’t need a good education.” Her Turkish parents, by contrast, wanted her to graduate from school and go to university. Sometimes it is teachers, the parents of schoolmates or neighbours (as in the case of Green Party politician Cem Özdemir) who support immigrant children if their own parents don’t give them the necessary encouragement. “All our efforts must focus on education and training” is therefore the motto of Integration Commissioner Maria Böhmer. You can’t rely on having nice neighbours or committed teachers.
