I'm one of those foreign folks who are registered and visa'ed into Germany. Yesterday, a statistical display was put out in Germany....talking up the foreigner numbers in Germany....for 2012. We, the foreigners.....are now up around 7.2 million....meaning that one out of every twelve in Germany....are foreigners.
It's an amazing number....considering that roughly seventy years ago.....there would have been so few foreigners in the country.
Increasing in number? Well...yes. The Turks might be on the decrease....but other European cultures have arrived because of bad economic conditions....to find German companies looking for bold new fresh faces.
What the report left out....is the adaptability and the willingness to stay. These are numbers which might be interesting to note. My humble guess is that half the folks coming for the technology jobs....will leave within five years and return to their country. The current economic downward trend will eventually clear up and things will return to a 'normal' balance.
One of twelve. It's an odd feeling to walk down a German street and consider that one out of every twelve folks that I meet....really aren't German. It's not the feeling you generally get in the US. I'd admit there are fifty million residents in the US who are foreign or one-generation US citizens. But it tends to be rare that you bump into such a person in most small towns.
The future? Germans aren't really clear about where this is all leading. They'd rather not think or dwell on this subject....it might be negative. Germans tend to be trusting in the idea that Germany will always be German in terms of society and culture. It might be a shock to wake up one day in twenty years to find the top ten German pop-singers are all foreigners....that the Chancellor is second-generation Turk-German....and that forty percent of the nation is made up of foreigners.
1 comment:
Germany has always been in the center of Europe. Many people came to live here, starting with the romans, the jews, people from the east, the north, the south, huguenots from France, miners from poland and so on. And some decands later, they were real germans, only their names stayed jewish, french or polish. Or turkish nowadays.
And all have these german attitudes of loving to work. So it is not important from where you are.
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