The end of the Cold War marked a major break for migration policies in Europe. Defensive projections and visions of migration came to the fore in a European Union whose integration and openness toward the internal border-free single market went hand-in-hand with joint isolation of a ‘Fortress Europe’ vis-à-vis undesirable and, especially illegal, in-migration from outside its borders. As long as a negative coalition against unwelcome immigration prevails instead of a European migration concept, Europe itself contributes to the illegalization of immigration and to the persistence of the enemy image of ‘illegal immigration’. Against a background of widespread and confused fears of migration pressure from outside Europe, three issues have to be promoted by clear political direction with long-term perspectives: (1) a further normalization in dealing with migration and integration; (2) the acceptance and understanding of the feasibility of these central issues of social life in an immigration country, but also (3) the pragmatic acceptance of the limits of migration control in view of the often underestimated autonomous dynamics of migration and integration processes. This combines perspectives of researching migration and integration as well as the shaping of policies.
United Germany has become more ethnically divers and, to a certain extent, more “multicultural” with a growing minority of immigrants and temporary migrants living within its borders. There are labor migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe with restricted work permits, immigrants coming out of the former “guest worker” population, and ethnic Germants from Eastern Europe as well as various groups of asylum seekers and other refugees.
Up to the end of the nineteenth century Germany was a country of emigrants. Until recently the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transatlantic migration of more than five million Germans, mostly to North America, has been largely forgotten in contemporary Germany, except by a few historians. That is all the more true for the mass movement of foreign migrant workers into the German labor market in the decades preceding World War I. Of immediate interest in West Germany today is the so-called “guest-worker question” (Gastarbeiterfrage) which is now becoming an immigration issue in contrast to the earlier “foreign-worker question” in pre-World War I Germany. In recent years West Germany witnessed the transition from a country hiring “guest workers” to one possessing a genuine immigrant minority. This ongoing experience has contributed to a new interest in the historical development of transnational migration in both of its manifestations, as emigration and as immigration. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Germany experienced alternating waves of the two forms of transnational mass migration, both of which were dwarfed by the internal migration streams.
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