They had an interview with the German Interior Minister (Thomas de Maiziere) yesterday. He's from the CDU Party and probably one of the more competent Berlin figures that is regularly seen on TV by the public.
He suggests some legislation that will change the foreigner episode in Germany......course, it's a question mark if there's enough support to pass the rules.
He wants to be able to deny long-term residence in Germany.....if the new immigrant refuses to learn German or refuses job offers.
He also wants the government to have some approval over where a refugee ends up living.....to avoid creating ghetto situations like you see in Belgium today. This would involve creating a state-right instead of a immigrant-right. This state-right would dissolve at some point when the refugee can ensure his livelihood with work.
SPD partnership comments? They've agreed in principal but they'd like to see how this is worded. You can probably expect opposition from the Green Party and the Linke Party (although it'll be curious how they say they like ghetto situations in public).
I would have very little confidence in this being implemented, and if you add on court challenges....even less confidence.
On the idea of kicking out immigrants who turn down jobs.....first, you have to be offered a job. If you have no marketable skill or valued education....who will offer the job? Even if they train you to some marginal degree, you can simply do badly in the interview process, and walk out happily unemployed.
The idea of controlling where a new immigrant lives? This would end up being a comical episode.
You'd have some German bureaucrat sitting in some city who has 1,500 refugees under his control. First, you'd have the affordable housing issue....where there's only a couple of neighborhoods in this city of 150,000 with apartments in the range of what the new immigrant can afford. You can take a guess about the condition of these apartments, and the neighborhoods there.
Then you need software to project where the 1,500 refugees live. How will you identify ghetto-possible neighborhoods? What science or research will you include into your wise method of dispersal?
Forcing half of the 1,500 folks to live 10 to 20 kilometers out away from this city? Fine, how will they get to integration classes and work? What if mass transit isn't practical? Will you pay for a new car for this immigrant?
So after new immigrant "Joe" has completed his mandatory two-year integration in this remote village or faraway area.....what do you think "Joe" will do on day one of his 'freedom'? He'll find an apartment in the cheap area of the metropolitan area, and move smack-dab in the middle of the ghetto. As hard as you fought, and you literally spent millions to try in preventing a ghetto establishment.....your new immigrant will outwit you in the end.
No matter what you do....other than tearing down the ghetto itself and making it into a park and thus forcing dispersal.....you can't beat the game being played out.
Back twenty years ago.....it would be a typical thing for Germans to criticize Americans on all the ghettos in America that we had 'created'. You'd sit and try to defend this but you really didn't have a good understanding how a ghetto got formed or generated. I sit here now.....looking at the Belgium method of creating ghettos (never intentional), and then look at the German method underway.....and I must admit.....I am amused.
No one sets out to create a ghetto. No social scientist, political figure, city engineer, or intellectual ever starts out with a plan to make a ghetto.
People look for cheap and affordable housing. They find like-minded people in that housing, and over a course of a decade or two.....they form a ghetto. It's never intentional....it's just the way it is.
In another five years, I'll actually be able to sit there and reverse the criticism episode of twenty years ago over American ghettos, and kindly ask my German associate why he went to such efforts to create German ghettos. He'll huff-and-puff.....getting all hyped up.....and eventually say it was the fault of George Bush. I'll grin, and say that even five-hundred years from now.....the 'George Bush' answer will still be uttered by Germans.
In the end, I think Germans would truly like to find a solution to their problems and make it work. But it's not like a broke BMW or clogged chimney where you can apply wisdom and a repair. Here, you are screwed.
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