I sat and watched German news last night (ARD and ZDF). The Chancellor ended up for an hour or two in Marxloh (a burb of Duisburg). Duisburg is a somewhat significant town up in north Germany. The showing? There's major hostility in the local area about the foreigners in the town. Duisburg is one of those towns with the label of 'no-go'.
My general impression was that Merkel wanted to placate the locals and let them know that Duisburg was on map and being viewed by Berliln.
There are two odd factors with the Marxloh area which the news folks put up on the screen. First, almost half of the town (nearly 50-percent) was foreign-resident. That's an awful lot. Second, there are roughly 90-odd countries represented in the Marxloh area. That....is a huge number.
Marxloh is basically a four mile by two mile chunk of land. It's hard to imagine that many nationalities based in the suburban area. Communication and integration would fall into play whenever you pass through the area.
I've looked around for examples of communities with fifty percent immigrants.....first-generation. Not just in Germany, but to include, and the world itself. Frankly, it's hard to find such an example. If you go to a major city like Phoenix, it's possible to find maybe some neighborhoods where it's 100-percent immigrant, but when you talk about the whole city.....the number drops way down.
My guess is that the Merkel appearance gave some positive points for the Berlin-crowd and maybe got some minor attention in Duisburg, but that just drifts off after twenty-four hours.
What no one would explain and one would be curious about.....how did Marxloh ever become this over-flowing melting pot? Where did this start and how did the government not envision this problem?
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