Immigrants

It seems quite simple really - what to do with immigrants, that is.

They are all trouble-makers or idle scroungers, they want to blow us all up or steal from us or laze around and live off the tax we pay ....

You hear this occasionally. So it is right and we must kick them out, right?

OK - dreadful confession. I am an immigrant. I am a foreign national living on a permanent residence visa and without a passport from my adopted country.

Ah, but you are a white European, so it doesn't count ....

Which about sums it up really.

There is my wife though - she is Asian, from Thailand, "yellow" skin etc. Working of course ("stealing jobs" is what you normally hear when the nationalist extremists hear that - wanting it both ways is essential to the argument!).

The relationship with Thailand of course is somewhat different here - a lot of German men have married Thai wives so somehow that is OK. They are Buddhists (good, so they can bring their religion with them, unlike the Turks whose Islamic beliefs are not always trusted).

This thin dividing line though is important to an extent, but generally the relationship between most Germans outside the former East and the immigrant community is relatively settled and occasionally quite friendly. The former East, home of most of the country's extreme nationalist politicians, has special circumstances which are best discussed another day.

One significant feature about immigration in much of Europe, though, is the bias of the story and what the facts actually are.

Much of the immigration per se is old news. The era of mass immigration has not been the past 10 years. I saw one intriguing stat recently that more "ethnic Turks" went back to Turkey in 2009 than immigrated here. Most of the immigration to Germany at least in recent years, which is not over-substantial, has come from Eastern Europe - Russia principally.

I was once again watching Geert Wilders' short film "Fitna" on YouTube tonight (more on this another time). Picking one fact out from it - Mohammed Bouyeri, the radical Muslim fanatic who murdered Theo van Gogh, is presented as everything that is wrong with Islam etc. To bear in mind Bouyeri was born in 1981 - in Amsterdam! He was second generation, from a family that migrated to Europe in the 70s and 80s. In substantial numbers.

Despite radical propaganda to the contrary from extreme nationalist groups, I doubt whether anywhere in Europe now has waves of immigrants arriving. The people labelled as "immigrants" are often second and third generation. They may have adopted their parents' or grandparents' culture when it comes to religion, for example, but they are as much German or Dutch or Italian etc. as any previous nationality that their parents held.

It is not unusual to sit on a local train here and hear two young women bedecked in Muslim headscarves talking German, often with a pronounced Hessisch accent!

Not everyone has adapted. There are, for instance, 200 or so individuals on the German security authorities most wanted (potential?) terrorist list, a good number of whom were born here. To remember though, there are 3 million people of Turkish origin here, and then a number from various countries in North Africa (Morocco, Tunisia etc).

It is also not unusual, when Turkey are playing football internationals on television, for young men to sit in public places watching the game - and drinking beer! A very German habit, but hardly encouraged by the strict Islamists!

I am reasonably encouraged by developments. Political parties often make cheap capital out of the need for more integration courses and the like, but that is typical politics - they cannot solve the economy, so they need some form of distraction, so let's blame the foreigners for something!

Fortunately that is not too common an occurrence though. More encouraging was the outcry the other week over the extreme nationalist group who murdered a number of immigrants (see my previous article on this). Few people (outside the former East) want the Nazis back - there will be a full week on that subject in Hamburg next year. Now if the signs elsewhere in Europe were as positive ....