Critics of Germany's race policy
Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2025 9:41 am
Non-Germans account for just under 10% of the population in Germany. But the reason the proportion is so high is that immigrants have not been granted the same citizenship rights as in countries such as Britain and France. Overall, the number of immigrants and people from families of immigrant origin is lower in Germany than in either Britain or France.
Mr Schmidt, 82, writes: "We have seven million foreigners today who are not integrated and the minimal number who do want to integrate are not given help to do so".
The Schröder government's immigration bill makes a first phone number list effort to address integration. It provides for classes to be given to immigrants on German language, culture and society that will be compulsory for residents of long standing who have failed to achieve a certain level of fluency.
Mr Schmidt says in his book: "There are two possibilities for a foreigner. Either he is a guest in another country or he wants to immigrate. In the latter instance, he must slowly but surely - and it is a difficult process - identify with his new fatherland and become a citizen. If he is a guest, he has a quite different status. Then he has neither the right to vote nor a claim to sickness benefit, health services and unemployment pay. This distinction has been lost".
Will see his remarks as richly ironic. Under Mr Schmidt and his successor, Helmut Kohl, both main par ties blurred the line between visitors and migrants by insisting that theirs was - in an oft-repeated phrase - "not a country of immigration", even though it was home to millions of foreigners. The foreigners who poured in to work in factories and on farms were "guest workers" who, it was implied, would one day return to their countries of origin.
Mr Schmidt, 82, writes: "We have seven million foreigners today who are not integrated and the minimal number who do want to integrate are not given help to do so".
The Schröder government's immigration bill makes a first phone number list effort to address integration. It provides for classes to be given to immigrants on German language, culture and society that will be compulsory for residents of long standing who have failed to achieve a certain level of fluency.
Mr Schmidt says in his book: "There are two possibilities for a foreigner. Either he is a guest in another country or he wants to immigrate. In the latter instance, he must slowly but surely - and it is a difficult process - identify with his new fatherland and become a citizen. If he is a guest, he has a quite different status. Then he has neither the right to vote nor a claim to sickness benefit, health services and unemployment pay. This distinction has been lost".
Will see his remarks as richly ironic. Under Mr Schmidt and his successor, Helmut Kohl, both main par ties blurred the line between visitors and migrants by insisting that theirs was - in an oft-repeated phrase - "not a country of immigration", even though it was home to millions of foreigners. The foreigners who poured in to work in factories and on farms were "guest workers" who, it was implied, would one day return to their countries of origin.