<
https://web.archive.org/web/20240122014805/https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/01/21/germany-strikes-a-brave-new-deal-on-immigration>
"GERMANY’S DEBATE over migration sometimes seems divorced from reality. The
country’s low birth rate and shrinking workforce imply a pressing need to
import manpower. Much political talk, however, is concerned with how to keep
immigrants away. The anti-immigration right is surging in opinion polls, and
even otherwise liberal folk are increasingly prone to saying that “certain
kinds” of immigrants are alien to the national
Leitkultur, a fuzzy concept of
Germanness.
Yet the past week has seen a turn. Earlier this month German media exposed the
proceedings of a private conclave of hard-right politicians at a posh hotel
near Berlin in November, where the participants discussed expelling millions of
aliens. That scandal woke up the dormant left, which has organised a series of
big “anti-fascist” demonstrations in cities across the country. On January 20th
some 250,000 Germans took to the streets in one of their biggest mass protests
this century.
Meanwhile, the governing centre-left coalition, made up of the Social
Democrats, the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats, has injected some good
sense into the immigration debate. On January 18th and 19th it passed two
immigration bills in the Bundestag. The first, pleasing to conservatives, will
make it easier to expel asylum-seekers with dubious cases, whose numbers have
soared since the end of the pandemic. The second, more significant law will
make it easier for legitimate immigrants to gain German nationality.
The reasons for the latter law are obvious, though German media has devoted
strangely little space to discussing them. An extraordinary 13.4m of Germany’s
84m residents do not hold citizenship. More than 5m of these have lived in the
country longer than ten years. In some cities the proportion is far higher: 45%
of the population of Offenbach, a big satellite of Frankfurt, are foreigners,
as well as a third of Munich’s and a quarter of Berlin’s. This number has
swollen rapidly in the past decade, partly because more immigrants have
arrived, but also because Germany has failed to naturalise those already here.
Germany’s “naturalisation rate”—the percentage of resident foreigners granted
nationality every year—was just 1.2% in 2021, well behind the European average
of 2.2%. Sweden did far better at 10%. The number Germany naturalised rose from
130,000 in 2021 to 168,000 in 2022, the highest in two decades. But the backlog
still grew, because of a range of obstacles: restrictions on dual nationality,
long residency requirements, tough tests to prove language skills and gainful
employment, and a clogged bureaucracy."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-malaria-vaccine-reforestation-china-poverty-india/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
