West Germany is currently suffering its worst immigration crisis since World War II. High unemployment and waves of Africans and Asians have caused sharply rising xenophobia, racial attacks, and increased hostility towards foreigners in general. The crisis stems partly from the Soviet Union and East Germany's efforts to sabotage, embarrass, and blackmail West Germany and partly from West Germany's welfare state.
The immigration crisis reveals much about the current status of East-West relations, the failure of the welfare state and guaranteed-income policies, and the limits of West German society. The current crisis is especially unfortunate since, for most of the postwar world, West Germany has been a model of open immigration and has taken in more than four million refugees during the past 40 years. Yet, the 108,000 refugees expected this year may result in permanently reducing the openness of Germany's borders.
Xenophobia is apparently on the rise. In Hamburg in north Germany, five young Germans - without provocation - chased a young Turk out of a bar, ran over him with their car, smashed his skull, and then killed him with an ax and clubs. The murder was widely believed to be racially motivated, and 10,000 people demonstrated to protest it in Hamburg a few days later.
As the Stuttgarter Zeitung observed recently, "the usual mindless antiforeigner feeling which manifested itself in slogans and open violence has long since been joined by a fear of coming into contact with Turks," the largest and perhaps most despised immigrant group in West Germany. "It is a feeling that has become so widespread that hardly any willingness exists to contemplate whatever problems the 1.5 million Turks may have."
The most famous journalist in Germany, Günter Wallraff, recently published a book on his year-long odyssey posing as a Turk. Wallraff - a master of disguise who has imitated right-wing reporters, businessmen, and senior officers of the German government - was so successful in passing himself off as a Turk that he was scorned by Germans, pelted with bottles and obscenities at a soccer game, and generally treated slightly better than a dog but much worse than a human. Wallraff's book helped make the immigration crisis a major issue.
The new atmosphere may be fueling hostile attitudes to any non-Germans living within West Germany's borders. Christian Democratic Union Burgermeister Count von Speed of Korschenborich recently created public furor when he joked that several rich Jews would need to be killed to balance his town's budget. Meetings of Far Right, Neo-Nazi groups in Bavaria are reportedly on the rise. According to a recent poll reported in Der Spiegel, 60 percent of Germans favor amending the constitution to restrict the right of asylum.
Numbers don't tell the story
In the first six months of 1986, immigrants included 8,900 Palestinians and Lebanese, 7,692 Iranians, 4,384 Turks, 3,911 Poles, 3,338 Indians, 3,081 Ghanaians, roughly 2,000 Sri Lankans, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis, and a handful of other nationalities. Total immigration this year is expected to exceed the previous record of 102,000 set in 1980.
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