Integration Spin

I stopped and pondered this news item from Germany today.  The German integration commissioner....yes, they do have one....Maria Böhmer....stood up and said that the German government ought to have a Integration Ministry.

This is an odd situation to view.  Typically....when people arrive on your shores, they have this dream of getting into your system....being part of your success....getting a boost up via your economic system.....and melding into your society.

You go to America in the 1800s, and people wanted to be part of the "dream".  You go and look at immigrants in Canada over the past hundred years, and it's the same.  You go and look at Australia over the past hundred years....and it's the same.  Yet, we have Germany with this odd problem where people came for something but no one is sure about why they came...and integration wasn't in their top three priorities.  You'd like to ask what is in the top three....but you'd just intimidate them and make them feel uncomfortable.

So, the answer here?  You spend tens of millions of Euro, to create an entire ministry?  You start with 500 staff members who walk around and talk integration daily?  You buy twenty Audi A8 staff cars to get these integration chiefs from meeting to meeting?  You pay some graphic arts company 40k Euro to create a integration symbol so you can walk proudly onto any TV show?   And then you spread out to have integration offices in every state, then every county, and then every city?

Sitting at some Gasthaus tonight in the heartland of Germany are Huns and Franz.  The boys sit there and chat over the events of the day.  They've had two beers and are nursing through the positive economic trend, the latest antics of national soccer teams, and then they come to this topic of integration.

Huns scratches his head and wonders how exactly a national office will change things.  Franz will respond that  the Hartz IV office does help welfare recipients.  Huns will counter that a jobs office would be enough to help most of the welfare recipients.  They will argue back and forth for an hour.

Finally, Musaff the local Turk walks in and orders a beer.  Huns and Franz asks Musaff what he thinks of this integration office idea.  Musaff thinks for a minute and offers a simple analysis: the worst punishment for any German is to spend ninety minutes on a Sunday evening political chat show listening to some German ministry guy sparkle and shine over some fancy policy change.  Musaff smiles, and then says....if you don't integrate, then you'd don't learn the language, and then you won't understand a word from the idiot from the integration ministry.  You can sleep well at night by claiming non-integration and the only one all bent out of shape from Sunday night political chat antics, will be the German idiots listening.....who don't worry about integration anyway.

Huns and Franz finally realize the brilliance of this.  The next day, they both enroll in a Turkish language class and work hard to non-integrate themselves.  After five years, their blood pressure is lower, their lives are simpler, and they both are happy as non-integrated Germans....in the German heartland.