I asked a simple question a year ago that was never answered. Germany needs immigration to avoid the fate of Japan, too many elderly with not enough workers to support them because their birth rate is no longer replacing those who die.
The Germans have a long history of Turkish and Italian immigration to provide their much needed workers. But first the Italians and then the Turks started to go home and the Germanized ones who stayed have as low of a birth rate as the native born Germans do.
To those who oppose muslim immigration on religious grounds: Where do you suggest that the Germans look to for their much needed immigration? Mexico?
This is not a trivial question for the US.
Our birth rate is now below the replacement level, all of our population growth is due to immigration.
Firstly, how about you run policies that encourage people to have more children? So changes to welfare or whatever? And actually *tell* people to have more? (Not suggesting a gun to anyone's head.) Unless you know for a fact this wouldn't work, then your question may be starting from a false premise in the first place.
But if that doesn't work, then the last thing you do, is allow in immigrants with a tendency not to integrate (FGM, polygamy, honour violence, support for sharia law etc.) especially without any controls to be telling people that they *need* to integrate or they aren't welcome. That's just a recipe for disaster and a divided society. Not to mention that you are letting in a group that is responsible for a big increase in the terrorism threat in the Western world.
Also, if you need migrant workers, explore whether it's practical to bring them in as temporary workers on 5 year visas or whatever. That way, you aren't paying for the education of their children or having to pay so much in medical or welfare when they get old. And whether they have shared values is less of a concern.
But for the sake of argument, why not Mexicans? Or Koreans? Or Chinese? Maybe Russians?
The Germans have tried to increase the number of children. They pay "kinder gelt" - child money. They have tried everything to increase the number of children. They provide child care. They have generous maternity leaves. Etc. It is not just that raising a child is expensive, it is that women want to have careers too. And few men want to stay at home. It is the same in the US except that we do very little to offset the costs of having children.
Yes, many immigrants don't integrate into the country. These tend to go home. Even in the US of unlimited immigration when the immigrants self-selected, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, one half of the immigrants went home. After the bad experience with guest worker programs the Germans want immigrants that will become Germans, if only in the second or third generation. This is the case now as they have permitted the children of guest workers to stay in Germany. Germany is largely secular. I use to joke that in the four countries that I have lived in that when they find out that I am an atheist, that the Americans are shocked, the Chinese are relieved, that the Canadians never find out because they are too polite to discuss it and the Germans assumed all along that I was because I am reasonably intelligent.
The second generation of the immigrants are as likely to be atheist as they are to be religious.
The Germans have gone through different waves of guest workers and immigrants. They know that they prefer immigrants because they become Germans.
They have large numbers of European workers in Germany now. They come from every country in the EU. But they tend to return home the first chance they get.
I was a guest worker and I had no desire to stay in Germany. They wanted me to stay. But for the most part my family stayed in the US. I really liked living in Germany. It is a much more comfortable place to live than the US. There isn't the constant worrying about having a job. The citizens of Germany are much more secure in their jobs and therefore in their lives. In the US companies use job insecurity to lower wage demands. The government mirrors this by fighting inflation as their priority by forcing layoffs in certain interest rate sensitive industries, like home construction, automobile and white goods manufacturing and construction.
Companies in Germany are as responsible for the welfare of the workers as they are responsible to make a profit for the shareholders. Wages are set by a system of industrial sector proportional negotiations between management and labor at the state,
lande, level between the manufacturers associations, the state government and the labor unions. They negotiate the minimum wage for a critical occupation for all of the companies in a certain industrial sector, say the assembly workers in the automobile industry and everyone else's wage is based on a percentage of that wage. A janitor might have a minimum wage of 0.6 of the base wage while a tool and die maker might have a minimum wage of 1.25 times that of the base wage rate. This form of negotiation took the most contentious negotiation out of the company level leaving them only with local issues. This system prevents the companies from competing with one another by lowering wages, since they pretty much pay the same wages.
You are deflecting, calling my premise false. If you believe that the Germans can't vet their immigrants adequately then how can they adequately vet the guest workers? And they will have to vet many more guest workers than they will immigrants.
We know that all of the Mexicans who come to the US to work are drug dealers and rapists because Mexico doesn't send us their best people. Our president told us this. Germany has admitted slavic people in the past who have German surnames but they also tend to repatriate when conditions improved in their home countries, too.
Almost everyone would prefer to live in the country they were born in. It takes an extraordinary event like a war started by idiot neoconservatives to encourage large numbers of people to want to move permanently to another country.
Merkel saw the refugees as a large number of potential immigrants than were available from other countries and the Germans aren't as bigoted against muslims as seems to be the case here.
I have never been religious, I was raised as an atheist. All religions seem to be filled with bizarre beliefs and practices and to mainly be an irrational basis for conflict. I guess that I can't grade the beliefs and practices fine enough to decide whose is the worse religion. Before 9/11 christians had racked up a much higher body count than muslims in the US. And yet there was no calls to stop christian immigration. But now that muslims have surged ahead in the body count, with suicide bombers blowing themselves up to gain ~60 virgins in heaven now we must limit muslim immigration and to tell the Germans that they must too!