Abstract

In contrast to most migration studies that focus on specific “foreigner” groups in Germany, this study simultaneously compares and contrasts the legal, political, social, and economic opportunity structures facing diverse categories of the ethnic minorities who have settled in the country since the 1950s. It reveals the contradictory, and usually self-defeating, nature of German policies intended to keep “migrants” out—allegedly in order to preserve a German Leitkultur (with which very few of its own citizens still identify). The main barriers to effective integration—and socioeconomic revitalization in general—sooner lie in the country’s obsolete labor market regulations and bureaucratic procedures. Drawing on local case studies, personal interviews, and national surveys, the author describes “the human faces” behind official citizenship and integration practices in Germany, and in doing so demonstrates that average citizens are much more multi-cultural than they realize.

“Mushaben’s major contribution to our understanding of migration and settlement, and of Germany as a country that contains diasporas, is that she has brought together the enormous literatures regarding Germany’s admission and absorption of the very different migrant population which have most often been studied individually.”  ·  Diaspora

Joyce Marie Mushaben is a Professor of Comparative Politics and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. An itinerant scholar since the 1970s, she has studied political mobilization, national identity, gender dynamics and generational change at universities in Hamburg, Berlin, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and Erfurt, thanks to generous support from the DAAD, the Fulbright Commission, the Ford Foundation, the German Marshall Fund and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, inter alia.