Germany desperately needs immigrants. 700,000 people emigrate from the country every year. [These are people who leave something great for something even better. Migrants like these constitute an enormous part of all migratory flows but they are rarely talked about because their comfort with liquid modernity is threatening. It’s much more pleasing to imagine an immigrant as invariably pathetic.]
There are 2,000,000 vacancies in Germany that are begging for highly qualified, educated personnel to fill them. There is also an aging population that needs young people to work in these high-tech jobs and feed the elderly.
Germans could say, “Hey, we need help here. We need immigrants who’ll assist us in solving this problem.” Then they’d go around the world trying to make themselves attractive to such immigrants.
That, of course, would require acknowledging vulnerability and need. And that’s not very pleasing. So instead Germans try to solve their problem in the same way as one of my colleagues asks for favors. Instead of coming to me and saying,
“Hey, I need a favor. Could you substitute me next week?”
she says, “Hey, there’s something really great I can do for you. I know you need experience teaching this kind of course, so I’ll let you substitute for me next week and you’ll gain some much needed experience!”
If you are desperate to preserve moral superiority at all costs, all you’ll end up doing is alienating people. Germans cling to their superiority through positioning immigrants – whom, once again, they desperately need – as subhuman, inferior, incapable and lacking in agency.
[And I’m not just ragging on Germans here. They are only an example. There is hardly a rich, developed country these days that doesn’t play this game.]
Moral superiority always comes at a great price. If you are desperate to play the Savior, you will never be free from endless crises and total collapse. And the only way to avoid that is to stop trying to be superior, acknowledge vulnerability and ask for help.
Clarissa's Blog 
“Germany desperately needs immigrants”
Why? It’s not a large country and is already very crowded. the challenge of the future is making an economy work with fewer rather than more people.
“There are 2,000,000 vacancies in Germany that are begging for highly qualified, educated personnel to fill them”
Then either they don’t pay well enough or there are too many possibilities to work and still eat in Germany. A combination of rising wages and/or cutting back on welfare benefits should fill them.
Meanwhile the people they’re brining in are mostly illiterate and barely educated and efforts of getting them into training programs have failed.
Whatever Germany is trying to do through by bringing hundreds of thousands of angry young men, it has nothing to do with needed educated workers. They could have had lots of educated workers from central and eastern europe (many of whom might like to go) but they’ve done everything they could to prevent them from coming.
My guess now is that the liquid exterritorial elite simply want there to be a permanent visible minority underclass everywhere and are doing everything they can to create them where they’re not happening by themselves quickly enough.
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700,000 people leave each year, the population is aging. There aren’t enough people to pay taxes and soon this will mean not enough money for pensions for the retirees.
The vacancies that exist in developed countries are not about anybody not having enough to eat. These are highly qualified positions for people who are not looking for benefits or higher wages.
Of course, this could all be solved by seeking educated, mobile people from all over the world. But doing that will not allow Germans to preserve the sense of moral superiority. Instead, they choose to entertain the ridiculous myth that, as you say, people are fungible. Of course, the likelihood that these 2 million high tech vacancies will be filled by refugees is nil. But Germans prefer to keep deluding themselves.
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“My guess now is that the liquid exterritorial elite simply want there to be a permanent visible minority underclass everywhere and are doing everything they can to create them where they’re not happening by themselves quickly enough.”
Have you heard about the Identitarian movement in Germany founded by Markus Willinger who wrote the manifesto, “Generation Identity” published in 2013?
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I’m familiar with Identitarianism as a thing but haven’t been interested enough to investigate. My first impression is that they place too much emphasis on genetics and not enough on language and culture.
I’ve been reading for a few years here and there that a political realignment is about to happen. The old division between conservative and liberal/progressive is shifting to a globalist vs localist division (however you want to phrase it). And it seems to be starting to happen a lot more overtly (qnd quickly) than I expected.
I think that’s what’s so interesting about the presidential election. Two of the three leading candidates seem to represent the localist more than globalist perspective.
Trump vs Sanders – localist vs localist (in stronger and weaker forms)
Trump vs Clinton – localist vs globalist
I honestly don’t think any Republican except for Trump has a real shot at the nomination unless the entire party power structure kicks him out or something similar happens. He seems to be the only republican to capture anyone’s imagination.
Interesting times…..
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Great point on globalist vs localist.
Trump does look more modern, so to speak, than the rest of the Republican candidates. He transmits the feeling of ease amidst the complexities of contemporary reality. This is a huge asset that other candidates should try to cultivate.
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Rhetoric aside:
Trump would be a globalist posing as a localist, imho. There’s nothing particularly localist about Trump as a person, since from infancy he’s traveled internationally with great ease due to his extreme wealth and lives in one of the most international cities of the world. The idea of home is “ok which residence am I currently staying in?” or “where is my money living right now?” He can talk about NYC all he likes but when push came to shove he wasn’t invested in NYC unless it made him a profit or got him a deduction on his taxes. Two of his wives are foreign born. This is absolutely hilarious to consider when he starts in on his Great Wall of Mexico ™, made-in-America schtick.
Sanders, to me, is super rooted and he looks it. Many of his positions can be boiled down to “old Jewish hippie from Brooklyn who moved to Vermont.” If I’m confused about something he says, I remember it and it instantly makes sense.
I just don’t buy Clinton as a native of any one place. She’s claimed to be from Chicago, Arkansas, Scranton (by association), New York, and DC, but these are all places she’s lived, not homes.
I think one of the reasons people did not trust Obama is because he’s had multiple places he can genuinely call home or a home and he has several real answers to “Where are you from?” This is incomprehensible to people who’ve never traveled and barely move and who view going to the airport as some kind of exotic thing instead of “what I do to visit friends/family/live my life”.
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The refugee crisis has been getting all of the news recently, but it’s not true that the Germans have been doing nothing to recruit smart/educated immigrants.
Over the last ten years the Germans have radically changed their educational system and immigration policies to recruit more foreign students (esp. in STEM areas) and made it much easier for them to stay in Germany after they finish their degrees. When I was a student in Germany in the 90s, it was incredibly tough to be a foreign student, the bureaucracy was thick and unhelpful, and there was little help at the university if your German language skills weren’t quite up to snuff. And the only easy way to stay when you finished a degree was to marry a German.
These days German universities publish brochures in English encouraging foreign students to come and study STEM and business fields in Germany and explicitly suggest that this is a great path for immigration. Most universities now offer a range of Masters programs taught partly or entirely in English and some are beginning to offer BA programs in English to attract more foreign students. Most universities have also set up German language programs for foreign students who know some German, but not enough to be admitted to a university. These programs usually allow them to enroll as students, live in the dorms, and do up to a year of intensive language study to prepare for full admission to a regular program and they charge no tuition. A couple of years ago the state level education ministries developed a new German language test that is available to high schools in other countries for free. Scores from this test are accepted by all public universities as proof of language qualifications for admissions.
It has never been easier for a student to go to Germany, get a degree, and stay there. Most of these new programs and initiatives have been marketed in Eastern Europe, North Africa, and Middle East and aren’t so well known in North America, but they are there and they are growing.
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Going to Germany as a student is, indeed, easy. But staying? It’s downright impossible. I know several people who got PhDs in Germany but were kicked out the moment they finished.
Even getting married to a German is not a guarantee. The German spouse needs to have a certain income and fulfill a certain number of requirements.
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What sort of PhD? and when? My understanding is that things have gotten much easier for folks with STEM and business degrees, but they are discriminating very much by field. A humanities or social sciences PhD will have just as much trouble staying as they ever did.
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You also have to factor in that students staying on do not apply for visas at a national level, they apply to offices run by the local state government and the state governments have a history of applying the rules differently. I could imagine that states like Bavaria with strong economies are being more generous with former students than the states that aren’t doing as well.
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“A humanities or social sciences PhD will have just as much trouble staying as they ever did.”
Exactly. Even though it is very clear that these are people who will assimilate a lot more easily than people from Somalia who don;t speak a word of German, are functionally illiterate and do not understand the culture.
In general, people like me are very aggressively not wanted anywhere in Europe. Canadians are the most welcoming to us. Americans are better, in this sense than Europeans, and worse than Canadians. And it’s not in the least a financial issue – we are the kind of immigrants who do not seek financial aid and always pay very high taxes. If there were an equivalent of Canadian Conservatives or American Republicans in Western Europe, we’d be wanted. But the Liberal mentality rejects us. What Trump says about Mexicans and Syrians, the kind, well-meaning Liberals from rich, developed countries easily tell us to our faces.
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You’re totally right, the humanities Ph.D. is definitely someone who will assimilate far better than any of the refugees. I suppose I have low expectations of the Germans in this regard, the fact that they are being more welcoming to STEM grads seems like huge step in the right direction to me.
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But are they as likely to get a job as an engineer or scientist? I majored in German in undergraduate school, read a lot of inspiring works by the world’s greatest authors along the way, and the only practical thing that my B.A. got me was a ticket to medical school.
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