If Germany Competes for Immigrants, It Can't Stay the Same

BERLIN You know we have entered a new century when a group of top political leaders spends hours talking about how badly Germany needs more immigrants.
"Our system needs people from the outside, because they add creativity," argued Hans-Olaf Henkel, a leader of Germany's employers' federation. He was speaking at a conference here last week sponsored by the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
"We have become a de facto country of immigration," explained the interior minister, Otto Schilly. He bemoaned the fact that so many smart immigrants have been leaving German universities for greener pastures in the United States.
"We need them!" argued Rita Sussmuth, a Christian Democrat who chaired a bipartisan commission on immigration that will deliver its final report on July 4. According to press leaks, her panel will recommend that Germany move to a new "points system" to select 40,000 immigrants who can legally become permanent residents each year. Applicants will win points for being young, healthy and, especially, well-educated. Mr. Schilly says a version of the proposal will probably be enacted into law by the end of the year.
The German immigration plan isn't exactly open borders, but it is a big step toward embracing the idea that foreign brainpower is desirable in today's global economy. And it is a huge change for a country like Germany, which long sought to protect its ethnic and cultural homogeneity.
Long after the Nazi horrors were past, Germany still worried about how to assimilate foreigners, such as the thousands of Turkish guest workers who came here freely until 1973. Even now, many ordinary Germans are frightened that the country will be overwhelmed by waves of immigrants arriving from the poorer parts of Europe, as the European Union expands eastward.
"The children will have to go to German schools and grow up speaking German, so that they can integrate into German society," insists Friedrich Merz, leader of the conservative opposition in the Bundestag. But he, too, wants to attract more clever foreigners.
I have been hearing a simi- lar "diversity envy" in other wealthy countries recently. The native-born populations of advanced countries like Germany, Japan and Sweden are shrinking, because of declining birthrates. To maintain prosperous economies, these countries will need foreign workers - which means there is likely to be increasing competition for the best and brightest.
A senior Japanese Foreign Ministry official complained to me several months ago about his country's difficulty in attracting bright Indian computer scientists, the sort of people who head from Bombay technical schools straight to Silicon Valley.
The hunger for Bombay software engineers is so intense in Germany, meanwhile, that an Indian émigré who runs a curry restaurant here joked to Mr. Henkel recently that because he was Indian, people assumed he must be a computer expert.
America's often chaotic cultural diversity, which led to bitter debates a decade ago in which some people actually wished aloud that the United States could be more like Japan, has ended up being one of America's secret weapons. Its universities attract the world's best and brightest. Its capital markets allow these newcomers to finance businesses and make millions overnight - and, with the Nasdaq crash, lose millions overnight, too. You can hear the same anguished arguments about diversity today in Germany that were common in the early '90s in America. Foreigners must learn the language, they must assimilate and accept national values. And one hears the same fear about political backlash from ordinary workers who don't want a new influx of foreigners. If they really intend to attract talented immigrants, countries like Germany will need to make big cultural changes. Embracing diversity has not been easy, even for the United States, a country whose national myth is that the people who leave the old country are the good people. How much harder it will be for the countries of Europe, which implicitly believe that the people who stay are the good ones.
It became obvious during the 1990s that globalization meant easy mobility of capital across national borders. In this decade, globalization will increasingly mean mobility of labor, too.
To compete in this global labor market, societies that have traditionally prized order will have to accustom themselves to a new level of social disruption, or risk falling behind.
The Washington Post.