They were noticeable for seeming slightly lost at the train stations where they arrived and were greeted by volunteers providing assistance. A call from friends trying to find a place to stay for a recently arrived family would lead to a collective scramble to contact local welfare agencies. In the months that followed, chance meetings at a bar, football match or the workplace would lead a circle of friends to extend invitations to some of the newcomers, who in time would become familiar faces.
Germany in the summer and autumn of 2015? Yes, but not only. And when traveling around the country at that time, it was jarring to see media coverage claim that what was taking place was unprecedented, when the same urban spaces had seen similar scenes play out repeatedly in the preceding 30 years. The mass influx of refugees that year from societies experiencing war and economic collapse caused a profound shock to German society and shook the political fortunes of then-Chancellor Angela Merkel. Yet this was not the first time Germany had experienced a sudden surge of migration in recent memory, nor would it be the last.
For anyone who, like me, was born in the late 1970s or early 1980s, the refugee surge of 2015 was only the latest of a succession of migration waves that reshaped the face of Germany reaching back to our childhood and teenage years. Whether ethnic German and Jewish migration from the Soviet Union and Romania; the massive influx of East Germans leaving a collapsing German Democratic Republic in the build-up and aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall; the thousands of economic migrants from across Eastern Europe; or refugees from the Yugoslav wars of secession or conflict in southeast Turkey—every German community in the late 1980s and 1990s was deeply marked by the mass movement of people. For kids from my generation, adjusting to the latest wave of new arrivals showing up as our neighbors, teammates in sports clubs or fellow school pupils became a matter of routine.
Though levels of migration to Germany as well as internal migration of East Germans to West Germany tailed off in the mid-2000s, by that point the impact of migration was part of everyday life in Germany. The renewed surge that first picked up with the great financial crisis after 2008, accelerated due to the uprisings across the Arab world after 2011 and continued with the arrival of Ukrainians as labor migrants and more recently as refugees are only the latest and probably not the last installments of mass movements of people that repeatedly played out over the past century. For all the claims made by then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1989 that Germany was “not a country of immigration, and cannot become one,” immigration and the emergence of politically influential diaspora communities have become defining features of post-reunification German democracy.
It took the subsequent decades under Kohl’s successors for many Germans to accept that their society had indeed become a country of immigration. Now Germany’s experience can provide us with some wider insights into how the mass movement of people can transform a society. Many Western European member states of the European Union experienced their own distinct processes of migration in parallel to the Federal Republic of Germany after 1945. More recently, Southern and Eastern European states in the EU that were once exporters of labor are attracting serious levels of inward migration due to a combination of rising wages and worker shortages. As a country that combines these distinct pre- and post-1989 experiences, Germany’s societal response to migration gives us a sense of the coming challenges the EU will collectively face.
As a country that combines Europe’s distinct pre- and post-1989 experiences with migration, Germany’s societal response gives us a sense of the coming challenges the EU will collectively face.Perhaps the most important of these insights is that, on a societal level, there is no such thing as temporary migration. As scholars such as Stephen Castles or Ruth Mandel pointed out at the time, the attempt through so-called guest worker programs to control the duration of a labor migrant’s stay failed to prevent migration from becoming a permanent feature in West Germany and other West European societies that embraced such schemes. Temporary work permit mechanisms that were designed to induce a return to countries of origin usually collapsed, as migrants facing even worse economic conditions in their homelands opted to stay. After West Germany’s guest worker program was terminated in response to rising unemployment in 1973, migrant numbers rose even further, as former guest workers sought to bring their families over to what had become their permanent homes. Yet with political parties so committed to the idea that migration was temporary, it took another 30 years for large parts of German society to accept the reality of Max Frisch’s quip that Germans had “asked for workers, but got people instead.”
The second core insight to be drawn from the experience of Germany and its Western European neighbors is the extent to which migrant diasporas intertwine the domestic politics of their countries of settlement with the domestic politics of their countries of origin. While this has always been a feature of global migration, the deepening of trade and transport links between EU member states and societies neighboring the EU means that migrant diasporas from these countries generate tight interactions between domestic politics on either side of the EU’s borders. The way in which election campaigning, activism and state surveillance involving Turkish, Ukrainian or Algerian domestic politics spills over directly into the domestic politics of EU states with large Turkish, Kurdish, Ukrainian or Algerian diasporas reflects the extent of this sort of contact.
In Germany, the decades of refusing to accept that migration had become a permanent challenge ensured that access to citizenship remained difficult for many members of such diaspora communities until the early 2000s. This meant that, rather than drawing these communities into German democracy, state policy reinforced their focus on the politics of their country of origin. The entrenched discrimination against these communities during their period of formation in the 1970s and 1980s also left bitter legacies that still enable politicians in countries of origin, such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to play on lasting resentment among diaspora communities.
The final insight one could draw from Germany’s decades of experience with mass migration relates to the limits of state power when faced with the mass movement of people. Successive German governments since the 1950s have claimed that they can tightly control Germany’s borders and, more recently, the collective borders of the EU. Yet as European integration intensified trade and travel around Europe after 1989, governments at a national level became dependent on coordination through shared European institutions to contain the smuggling of goods and people. The emergence of tighter controls along the EU’s external borders in order to sustain public support for the removal of border controls within the EU has embedded the dependence of German governments on the EU system. Though the sheer size of the refugee surge of 2015 came as a shock to Germany’s political leadership, the pressure that had been building on the EU’s external borders as well as the extent to which European states were dependent on collective EU institutions to manage it had been visible since the 1990s.
State institutions’ struggle to influence migration can also be observed when it comes to its economic dynamics. Policies to handle migration and integrate diaspora communities have regularly been overwhelmed by structural economic shifts that were not properly accounted for. In the past few years, for instance, global economic and demographic trends have generated acute labor shortages that have blindsided many in Germany and other EU governments who had come to take it for granted that there would always be too many people and not enough jobs. The pivot in 2020 to more flexible frameworks intended to encourage skilled worker migration indicates that some German policymakers have recognized that a changing demographic environment requires a fundamental rethink of the politics of migration.
The coalition agreement negotiated between the Social Democratic Party, the Greens and the Free Democratic Party after the September 2021 general elections signals that the government under Chancellor Olaf Scholz has recognized these insights regarding the impact of migration on German society. The agreement’s intensified focus on integration programs that include easier access to citizenship reflects an understanding that the German state will face the twin challenges of migration and integration for many years to come. Its greater focus on fostering diversity in public and private institutions as well as more systematic outreach toward immigrant communities acknowledges that integration is a two-way process in which Germany absorbs aspects of diaspora cultures as much as diasporas adopt the constitutional foundations of German democracy. And its emphasis on greater coordination with EU partners along with a more flexible approach to how quickly someone wanting to work in Germany can access legal pathways into the European labor market recognizes that a changing economic and geopolitical environment requires a more coherent state strategy toward borders and migration.
This shift in attitudes on migration is perhaps also a product of how members of my own generation who grew up in a world shaped by the influence of diasporas are now entering positions of power within German society. The generations that entered adulthood between the late 1940s and late 1980s in East and West Germany were still immersed in a cultural environment that refused to accept that their country could be a nation of migration. Those who have entered adulthood after 1989 grew up in a world in which, despite structural discrimination, migrants could increasingly be found in almost all social milieus and almost every region.
After many decades of societal dysfunction, this cultural shift is finally opening up political space for a different and perhaps more realistic approach to the management of migration and borders. Hopefully those societies in Southern and Eastern Europe that are now beginning to go down the same migration path can learn some lessons from the German experience and not waste as much time repeating Germany’s mistakes.