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Facing reality on Europe's immigrants - -

By David C. Unger

Editorial Observer

Facing Reality on Europe’s Immigrants

Published: November 12, 2006

“Write an article!” came the shout as I left a room full of German women preparing the food for their weekly breakfast discussion meeting in the Rollberg housing project in the Neukölln section of Berlin.

They were Germans now, but most had been born elsewhere, generally in Muslim countries. One wore a head scarf, the others did not. The youngest looked about 19. The oldest might have been a grandmother.

These women illustrated a reality finally accepted by some of Germany’s most conservative politicians — there is no reason someone cannot be German and Muslim at the same time. In America, that idea would be unremarkable. In Germany, with its tragic history of exclusive nationalism and race-based citizenship, it is an intellectual revolution.

The moving spirit behind these meetings was Ayten Köse, an infectiously enthusiastic woman of Turkish descent, who relished telling a visitor what it had taken to make this project a reality.

The weekly breakfasts were among the activities of an outreach program sponsored by the local government and the European Union. One goal is to help the project’s residents connect with one another and with local public services. That, in turn, is meant to reduce the sense of isolation many immigrants feel from the larger society they live in and from its political institutions.

Through this program, residents had gotten help in ridding public rooms in the housing project of the intimidating young toughs who hung out there, discouraging women from leaving their apartments. That reclaimed space became home to the Friday breakfast gatherings, where the women compared notes on problems from domestic violence to developments in Afghanistan, Gaza and Iraq.

It took a long time for Germany’s leaders to wake up to the fact that millions of foreign-born or foreign-descended residents — people who originally arrived as guest workers or asylum seekers, along with their German-born children and grandchildren — intend to live their lives in Germany with no plans of returning to their ancestral homelands.

More than three million of these new Germans are Muslims — nearly two million from Turkey, with most of the rest from Bosnia, Albania, the Arab world, Pakistan and Iran.

It is in Germany’s interest to help these newcomers succeed and prosper, by helping them improve their German language skills, preparing them for better jobs and smoothing their path to German citizenship. That lessens the risk of their slipping into an underground world of isolation, joblessness and despair, where they might fall prey to terrorist recruiters.

The new realism of its politicians is welcome, but Germany has a long way to go. Immigrants still face violent attacks from xenophobic neighbors and the discriminatory attitudes and practices of some local governments. Despite recent reforms, it remains too difficult for many long-time residents to become citizens.

Yet, despite its shortcomings, Germany’s new approach contrasts favorably with that of neighboring France — the home of Western Europe’s largest and perhaps least integrated Muslim population.

French policies have been confounded, paradoxically, by the country’s militantly integrationist official ideology. The well-meaning insistence that all French citizens are simply French has led to decades of willfully ignoring the particular needs and diverse cultures of distinctive segments of the French population.

The poor and unemployed young men who burned cars in suburban neighborhoods last fall weren’t protesting the noble French ideal of égalité. They were protesting the daily humiliation of coping with police officers, politicians and employers who have no real idea of what their lives are like and no desire to find out. It is that kind of estrangement that German programs like the one in Neukölln are trying to avoid.



    
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