Handelsblatt author Thomas Hanke analyzes interesting data and trends from all over the world in the column.
(Photo: Klawe Rzeczy)
Good news for everyone who cares about the cohesion of our society: the clash of cultures is not taking place. Migrants and their descendants in Germany and France do not tend to isolate themselves in parallel societies. They mingle with mainstream society, as studies by the Federal Statistical Office, the French statistical office Insee and the institute for demographic studies, Ined, show.
That’s plain statistics. But admittedly one that gets little attention. Illegal immigration and the supposed lack of deportation of illegal immigrants dominate the political debate. This is also the case now with the reform of immigration law: the easier immigration of skilled workers is to be made politically more palatable by promising to increasingly deport illegal immigrants.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron is preparing a very similar reform. In both countries, on the other hand, the real integration achievements of those not born in the country and of the receiving societies are given little recognition.
One of these is the connection of people “with a migration background” – people who were themselves born as a foreigner or who have at least one parent who was born as a foreigner – with the longer-established population.
A further form of integration than forming a couple with a German life partner can hardly be imagined. Opponents and supporters of immigration should probably agree on this.
No trend towards parallel societies
If the thesis of the trend towards parallel societies were correct, then these connections would only occur in exceptional cases. Those born as foreigners and their descendants would always marry in their same culture or ethnic group, as on a reservation.
In societies like the US, that may be the case. However, this also has to do with the fact that US statistics still divide the population according to ethnic origin. Each respondent chooses how they classify themselves: White, Black, Hispanic. And these different classifications are stable, shades do not exist by definition.
In France and Germany, on the other hand, things are completely different. “From generation to generation, the mixing of pairs increases,” the Insee researchers as well as those of Ined found in a study published in 2022.
While 27 percent of the direct immigrants join forces with a “native” Frenchman, the figure is already 66 percent in the second generation. In the third generation, 90 percent only have one foreign grandparent.
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Together, the migrants and their children already make up a third of the population in France, and in Germany it is even 38 percent.
Signs point to fusion instead of clash of cultures
A trend similar to that in France can be seen in Germany. “One can say that the number of marriages between people with and without a migration background is increasing in Germany,” says the Federal Statistical Office. This becomes clear when you take a close look at people “with their own migration experience” – they have immigrated themselves.
In the first five years of their stay, most of them remain single. Those who have been living here for more than 15 years are predominantly (54 percent) married. Three quarters of them are connected to a German, only 26 percent to foreigners. The signs, the numbers imply, favor fusion rather than clash of civilizations.
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That doesn’t mean that everything is automatically ordered for the best. There are too many children with a migration background who have considerable difficulties with the German language, for example. However, this does not have general validity.
In big cities, however, elementary schools with 90 percent of the children of immigrants are no longer the exception – and so there are still obstacles in communication. You can deal with that. But that assumes that we don’t discuss e-fuels for sports cars any more intensively than we do about the next generation of people in our country.
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