4 - 2002

New immigration policies

Faint hearts and scaremongers

by Robert Leicht

Germany finally is discussing openly the different aspects of immigration: On one side considering her own interest, how immigrants could help to cope with Germany’s economic and demographic problems, on the other side considering the difficulties of integrating a large number of immigrants.

On one side the fears, on the other the illusions – here the terror of foreign domination, there the multi-culti fantasies – there has hardly ever been a political topic which has so stubbornly escaped rational consideration, over so many years, as the need to regulate immigration. The faint-hearted populists on the right didn’t want any regulation of immigration because they were suspicious that anyone involved with the sluice gates would really be planning to leave them wide open, day and night. The dreamers on the left would rather not have any precise regulation of immigration either, because they suspected that the planners would keep the sluice gates shut day and night.

That the legislative process ended by degenerating into such a wild spectacle at the federal level appears to be only the latest dot on the ”i” of the failure to rationalise a highly emotional topic. But the truth is much worse: the immigration issue had already been rationalised long ago. The process began with the Chancellor’s Green Card initiative on February 23rd, 2000. Then came the work of the Immigration Commission chaired by Rita Süssmuth, which presented its report on July 4th, 2001. Since then the legislative wheels have been turning.

In the end, in the form in which the immigration law was finally brought to the vote, there was no rational reason, based on the content, even for the conservative opposition to turn it down. To the contrary: it would have been easy to derive the basic lines of the government’s arguments from the party papers of the Christian Democratic Union itself.

The question of how much immigration a country needs or can bear will remain a controversial one from year to year, in the future as well. It depends on the changing economic situation and whole constellations of issues. Population concerns, the labour market, humanitarian obligations – these cannot always be brought together over one common denominator. For example, what sort of immigrants are needed by the labour market will be judged differently by the various trade unions, and again differently by various branches of industry, according to their economic situations and interests.

To put it very pointedly, a law on immigration cannot set up regulations once for all, but can only regulate the way in which immigration should be regulated from year to year. The law can only establish an open process, which is flexible enough to move with the times and the changing situation. It also calls for a ”breathing” decision-making mechanism. And that is just the intent of the new immigration law in Paragraph 76, where it establishes an independent panel of experts for the Federal Office of Migration and Refugees which is to be created. Every year, this ”migration council” is to issue a ”recommended maximum number” of immigrants to be admitted that year, taking into consideration asylum seekers, returning emigrants and the desired immigration of qualified workers. For this last group, a process of selection by means of a point system is provided.

What is new about this most recent debate is not really that Germany is to admit more immigrants in future, or significantly more, but rather that we finally define what kind of immigration we want, in our own interest, and which we don’t want. We would finally make a clear distinction between two types of immigrants: those who are needed by a receiving country for ”selfish” reasons, for their work skills, and those who need a receiving country for humanitarian reasons, the refugees and asylum seekers.

With regard to humanitarian immigration, there are no new questions, in principle; our obligation to take in refugees is in any case determined by international law. In this area what mainly needs to be done is to tighten and standardise procedures, to train department personnel better (including how to deal with traumatised and inept refugees), and otherwise to keep information on the human rights situation up to date, also for purposes of cooperation with humanitarian organisations.

What is new in the debate on immigration is therefore that discussion has finally begun on our self-interest in accepting immigrants. However, though the previous discussion was often overshadowed by irrational fears, it should not now reverse and go in an illusory direction. At the heart of the problem are three areas: population studies, the labour market and integration.

With regard to population, the ”Commission on Immigration” studied in detail the inauspicious aging of the German population, and the question of how much immigration could compensate for it. The ”immigration law” simply passed this topic by, for good reason. Immigration cannot be used as a demographic instrument, especially not for a precisely planned population policy. To keep the population in Germany at a constant level until 2050, scientific projections would call for 17.8 million immigrants.
This would only stabilise the number of inhabitants, not the proportions of the various age groups. To turn the population pyramid right side up again would require 188 million foreign immigrants by 2050, an average net gain of 3.4 million people each year, which is 56 times the rate during the last five years – and the increase would have to have the required proportions as to gender and age group.

It would be impossible to integrate such numbers of immigrants, or to regulate the proportions. In other words, what is possible to do realistically in terms of immigration will only have a marginal effect on the demographic problem. The most that can be said in this context is that demographically immigration will do no more harm than good. Or, to put it another way, we have to deal with the consequences of our own preferred ”reproductive behaviour” – and any other ”solution” would be less costly politically, socially and economically than mass immigration.

With regard to the labour market, ”If we are lacking certain types of workers, we can get them through immigration!” At first glance this recipe seems to have a lot in its favour, but in reality it is much too simple to be true. This can be seen in our own ”migration” problem within own country, the movement of job-seekers from east to west Germany. Since 1995 the gross figure for German East-West migration is well over 150,000 per year. Even so – and despite mass unemployment which officially still hovers around four million nation-wide – there are labour shortages in certain sectors of German markets. This, however, is far from indicating that intentional job-oriented immigration would be without conflicts of interest, a simple win-win situation for all concerned.

A study for the Immigration Commission on Labour requirements under high unemployment – an economic immigration concept for Germany (Springer Press, Berlin et.al., 2002), sheds light on these extremely complex problems. It says, ”Even when immigration leads to a rise in income for our people as a whole, some groups within the native population will lose through immigration, while other groups will gain”. Nevertheless, this model calculation shows that in every case the capitalist factor is among the winners, which would explain the interest of employers in goal-oriented immigration.

In the light of all this, how can the future cost of integration be estimated? For the most part it will consist of catching up with the assimilation, hitherto neglected, of immigrants who are already in the country. There is still a lot to do in this regard. However, if future immigration is really regulated in a way that makes sense, the many ”highly qualified” and ”qualified” immigrants (according to the point system) will be easier to integrate. This would not bring the costs of integration down to nothing, but they would remain manageable; if it does not happen this way, the rather marginal economic gain will be consumed by the integration costs. Certainly none of this applies to immigration for humanitarian reasons, but such immigration is to be considered, rightly, quite apart from calculations of economic gain or loss.

What do we have left, after giving up our exaggerated fears and too-easy illusions in favour of  a realistic view? Basically, we still have to deal with our demographic problem, and our labour shortages, mainly with our own resources, expecting only a rather modest contribution through controlled immigration. For this measure of desirable immigration in our self-interest, plus humanitarian immigration in accordance with international law, we certainly need an integrated concept which shows the succession of decisions clearly, so to speak from the border crossing onwards, as to who will be integrated and how – and who must go away again, and when. This is just what has been formulated by the law on immigration. It is high time it was allowed to take effect.

Journalist Robert Leicht, a member of the EKD Council and of its Advisory Commission on Theology, was editor-in-chief of DIE ZEIT until 1997, and since then has been a political correspondent for this weekly newspaper. This article, here abridged, appeared in DIE ZEIT No. 14/2002.