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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between subjectivity and the other during the course of integration among 50 young Muslims of dual national heritage in Germany. The largest group of migrants within Germany are people of Turkish and Kurdish origin. During the summer and autumn of 2018, we interviewed 50 individuals of both genders aged between 18 and 25. The interviews were carried out and evaluated in North Germany. We saw that the 'feeling of being held', 'being‐able‐to‐process‐(negative)‐experiences' and 'to take responsibility for oneself and other' are characteristics of well‐educated young Muslims. Those who feel at home in their Turkish family or in the Islamic religion are able to process positive and negative experiences and present more (mature) super‐ego structures. This allows them to be able to deal with the challenges of migration and integration. Based on the data, we developed the 'Triadic Model of Integration' within the Lacanian L‐Scheme of Subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among literary responses to contemporary migration to Germany, Terézia Mora's short story "Selbstbildnis mit Geschirrtuch" stands out as a critical engagement with the various forms of exclusion migrants face. The story recasts the Holocaust‐era refugee experience of the German‐Jewish painters Felka Platek and Felix Nussbaum in contemporary Germany. Although others have considered the relation of Holocaust memory to migration, Mora approaches it from a novel perspective informed by Walter Benjamin's notion of weak messianism and Jean‐Luc Nancy's philosophy of negative community. Motifs of infernal descent are found throughout the story and dramatize the protagonist's exclusion. Weak messianism and negative community shape the response to exclusion in the narrative. Specifically, the story dramatizes alternative forms of being together beyond linguistic borders. Accordingly, this paper demonstrates how the text interrupts the temporal, physical, and linguistic borders of German society, gesturing towards the possibility of collectivity not underwritten by exclusion of the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How receiving society members perceive and respond to immigration are crucial factors that shape the context of reception for immigrants coming to a new country. In this paper, we examine these processes through the lens of intergroup contact research, with a focus on relations between immigrants and members of receiving societies, to discern ways in which receiving societies are or are not welcoming toward immigrants. Reviewing recent theorizing with illustrative empirical studies and ongoing programs of research that focus on new immigrants in Germany and the United States, we describe how direct and indirect forms of positive and negative contact can serve either to facilitate or inhibit positive immigrant‐receiving community relations. We also discuss factors that may contribute to the emergence of positive and negative contact experiences between immigrants and receiving society members. We close with a discussion of policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the determinants of return migration as foreign-born men approach old age in Germany. Return migration in later life engages a different set of conditions from return migration earlier on, including the framing of return as a possible retirement strategy. Using 23 years of longitudinal data from the German Socioeconomic Panel, this paper investigates how social and economic resources of immigrant men influence decisions to return 'home.' Results suggest that immigrants from former guest worker recruitment countries within the European Union are more likely to return than non- EU immigrants. In addition, return migrants are 'negatively selected' so that those with the least education and weakest attachments to the labor force are more likely to emigrate. However, findings vary greatly depending on the immigrant's age and country of origin. Results from this paper highlight the heterogeneity of older immigrants and the factors that motivate their return 'home'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Germany's new immigration law, which took effect in 2005, was hotly debated over a period of four years. This paper follows the debate on the law through the newsprint media, examines the representation of immigration as an economic utility, and investigates the contents of this economic-utility perspective of immigration in light of neoliberal restructuring in Germany. The analysis focuses on 609 articles sampled from five major German daily newspapers published between July 2001 and August 2005. A discourse analysis suggests that the newsprint media represented immigration on the one hand as an economic necessity to replenish the labor market and ensure the international competitiveness of key industrial sectors. On the other hand, immigration was depicted as an economic liability that raises unemployment rates and burdens the public welfare system. Although the media emphasized the economic necessity of immigration, the final law does not permit any significant immigration of labor. The paper resolves this contradiction by situating media discourse in a wider context of neoliberal reforms and European Union expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the entrepreneurial endeavours of immigrants' and natives in Germany, concentrating on Turks, Germany's largest immigrant group and one under-studied in the literature. Self-employed Turks in Germany represent about 70 per cent of all Turkish entrepreneurs in the European Union. We use data from the German Socio-economic Panel to study patterns of self-employment. First, we identify the characteristics of the self-employed individuals and understand their underlying drive into self-employment. Next we investigate how immigrant entrepreneurs fare in the labour market and compare their earnings to those of the natives. It is important for decision makers to understand entrepreneurial patterns so that they can shape policy that better fosters entrepreneurial activities. This paper presents several findings that can inform better policymaking. First, our investigation indicates that education is not decisive in determining whether one will choose self-employment over salaried work nor in explaining earnings. The estimated age-earnings profiles are the same for natives and immigrants, while the proclivity to become self-employed is concave with respect to age for both groups. Immigrants' start with a higher probability to work than natives but have a slower increase in the self-employment probabilities thereafter. The earnings of self-employed immigrants' are higher initially, but their earnings path crosses eventually that of the natives. Second, we find some suggestion of ethnic entrepreneurial spirit. Turks are 70 per cent more likely to be self-employed than any other immigrant group, although they do not necessarily earn more. These patterns should be further explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human smuggling has recently become an important issue in the migration policy debate almost worldwide. Despite suggestions about how to handle this phenomenon ranging from common border policies to an augmentation of legal migration channels, surprisingly little is known about the mechanisms of human smuggling, particularly its organizational principles. This paper aims to give both overview and insight into the organizational principles of human smuggling processes. The empirical results are based upon two different kinds of material, expert interviews, and - almost exclusively in this field - copies of 51 complete court proceedings from all over Germany. They consist, apart from police reports and judgments of the courts, of interrogations of smugglers and smuggled persons as well as smugglers' telephone conversations, which were transcribed and translated. All in all, these cases provide information on several hundred human smugglers and approximately 20,000 persons being smuggled. For each case, the essentials were checked, including the socio-economic characteristics of the smugglers and those being smuggled, which consisted of age, gender, origin, education, and social status. With regard to the smuggling process, the details examined included who commissioned the smuggling, which places were used as stages on the journey, which means of transport were employed, whether forged documents or documents obtained by artifice played a role, the method of payment, the fees paid, the influence of the ethnic group, and whether the smugglers had connections to other criminal fields. The combination of these elements then led toward a typology of human smuggling processes. Three main types of human smuggling processes have been worked out: the first is “individual smuggling with a high degree of self-responsibility”, and although in expert interviews this form of smuggling without pre-organized stages was supposed to be anachronical, in fact it still exists; the second is “covered” smuggling based upon obtaining visa by artifice; the third is “pre-organized stage-to-stage smuggling”, which was divided into three subtypes mainly influenced by the origin of both the smugglers (“stage coordinators”) and the smuggled migrants. Overall, it can be said that in the absolute majority of the cases there is nobody in control of the whole smuggling process like a leader of a criminal organization. For functional reasons, it would also be inefficient for a huge organization to be responsible for a process that comprises distances of several thousand kilometres. Thus, members of an almost entirely mono-ethnic network function as “stage coordinators” while the smuggling actions themselves are outsourced to local smuggling groups. Such a close network of relatively few stage coordinators hardly ever meeting each other is only conceivable under the pre-condition of existing modern communication systems. The coordination level of human smuggling processes, therefore, seems to be an entire part of the migration network. On the other hand, the actions of the local smugglers on the performing level are completely guided by market conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that migration studies are too parochial, focusing exclusively on ostensible immigration and incorporation policies and failing to take into account the ‘structuring’ effects of the overall institutional framework. The need for more comparative and more economically-oriented research is presented through a reflection upon the recent Dutch debate on the causes of the lagging performance of Turks in the Netherlands compared to those in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transformations in global capitalism increased rates of international migration at the turn of the twentieth century, a period also marked by the widespread popularity of scientific racism, integral nationalism, and vaunted notions of state sovereignty. This paper considers how the intersection of these factors influenced migration and citizenship policymaking in Canada and Germany. In both cases, migration was harnessed to further economic objectives while groups deemed a threat to national integration because of their putative racial or ethno-national characteristics were excluded. The resultant policies would come to define Canada and Germany’s approaches to the migration-membership dilemma for the much of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts of various articles. T.H. Marshall's distinction between the political and social dimensions of citizenship provides a useful framework for analyzing the situation of African Americans over the course of the last three decades. The civil rights and urban social movements of the 1960s and 1970s eliminated the legal superstructure for circumscribing African American political citizenship. Citizenship in Latin America is a set of highly conflictive and contested statuses around which the strategies of elites are played out, particularly over the making of the modern nation as seen historically in the treatment of indigenous peoples. In the paper by David M. Smith and Maurice Blanc, on citizenship, nationality and ethnic minorities in European Nations, the authors look at a question of citizenship in democratic society by an examination of the treatment of ethnic minorities in the Great Britain, France and Germany. Germany represents an especially interesting case study for the legal institutional aspects and the politics of immigration because it experienced high rates immigration of ethnic Germans and asylum seekers in the early 1990s, at a time when the unification of East and West Germany raised issues about the meaning of national membership.

Recent theoretical research deals with economic costs and benefits of cultural diversity related to immigration. However, empirical evidence regarding the impact of cultural diversity on economic performance is still scarce. We analyse the effect of cultural diversity of the labour force on patent applications for a cross-section of German regions. The results suggest that differences in knowledge and capabilities of workers from diverse cultural backgrounds enhance performance of regional R&D sectors. As regards innovation, the benefits of diversity seem to outweigh the costs caused, for example, by communication barriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]