Germany Shows Us What The Future Holds For America Unless We Deal With Illegal Immigration

by John Hawkins | May 24, 2006 11:30 am

Want to see what our future is if the Senate gets its way on illegal immigration? Then look at this excerpt from an MSNBC article about Germany’s guest worker program[1]. It’s so familiar that it’s almost feels like deja vu….

“Germany is home to millions of immigrants, 3 million of whom are Muslim. The majority were invited to the country as gastarbeiters, or guest workers, mainly from Turkey. Faced with a labor shortage in the 1950s, and 60s, then-West Germany encouraged foreigners to fill positions in factories and in construction.

“The Germans recruited untrained and uneducated people,” said Steffen Angenendt of the German Council on Foreign Relations. “It didn’t seem necessary to have academics come to Germany to work on an assembly line. They were trained on the job.”

Given temporary visas, the Germans expected the workers to come, make money and then head home.

What the government didn’t count on was the employers’ reluctance to let trained workers leave. So the men stayed and then brought their families — along with their traditions, religion and culture.

The immigrants settled together and neighborhoods slowly began to reflect their new inhabitants. Signs were hung in Turkish, supermarkets sold Turkish products and stands selling kebabs — a traditional meal in a sandwich similar to a gyro — popped up in nearly every German city.

“They came in the sexual revolution and they saw the communes — men, women and children living together. It was a shock for these people, so of course, they put up borders,” said Seyran Ates, a lawyer who works with immigrant women. “It was automatic. They felt, they don’t want us here, and on the other side, we don’t want to be like them; they are immoral,” Ates said.

As German industry changed and the need for more qualified workers rose, the jobs filled by many of these laborers disappeared, leading to widespread unemployment.

“The discussion on integration problems you have today is to a large extent a result of this immigration,” said Angenendt, who was part of a committee which suggested future immigration policies for the government. “These workers had no ability to adjust to the labor market.”

Although there were efforts at the city and state level to assist in integration, little effort was made on a federal level — an oversight that has ramifications even today. Language has proved to be one of the bigger challenges. Many immigrants and their families don’t speak German, which makes it more difficult for them to find work.

“Integration never really started,” said well-known actor Mehmet Kurtulus, who came with his parents as a baby to Germany from a small town in Turkey. “The Germans missed the point that workers are people with families.”

This is especially obvious in the German school system, in which even second-generation children perform significantly worse than their native-born counterparts, according to a report by the international Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.”

We’re in the same situation as Germany except we’re bringing in the workers illegally. We’re flooding our country with foreigners who are uneducated, don’t speak our language, and don’t want to assimilate. Guess what? The results are going to be the same down the line, too.

Endnotes:
  1. MSNBC article about Germany’s guest worker program: http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_3812704

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