Re: European Union
Sarrazin is currently the hottest topic in the country. He's sparked outcry lots of times, but now that he published his book, even the last person here ought to know him.
I haven't read his book yet, but I'm planning to. Why? Know thine enemies? No. This is going to raise a few eyebrows, but... he's not entirely wrong.
Sarrazin is picking up on a debate that a few social democrats have tried to raise but failed. I said this a number of times, but I live in a borough of Berlin that is notorious for its social problems. It may not be LA, it may not be the banlieus of Paris, but it's still the worst you can get in this country. Simply speaking, it is populated by immigrants and unemployed. And when I say unemployed, I mean people who have lived on welfare all their lives, like their parents and grandparents did. And when I say immigrants, I mean mostly Turks and Arabs who run their Turkish and Arab shops where you get frowned upon when you enter as a German. Who keep their women veiled and behind closed curtains. And occasionally you see some of them in the supermarket queue with bruises all over their face. You see children who are running around the streets at night. You see the poorest of the poor.
What is happening is that Turkish, Arabic, Russian, African and other ghettos are forming. They are still embryonic and small, but they are forming.
I'm not making that up, and I'm not repeating what others said- that is what I see. And it's not only happening in Berlin- it is happening in every major city. Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, you name it.
But, public opinion in this country is dominated by people who do not live here. They live in their suburbs or their well-off boroughs where the immigrants speak flawless German and are fully integrated to society and the tramps disappear at night-time. Where the schools have classes of 25 children maximum only one or two of which are from abroad.
Now the mayor of my borough - a social democrat - said publicly what everybody knows here. That Turkish immigrants keep their daughters from school and that unemployed Germans get drunk on welfare money. It sparked a major outcry - generalisation, racism, generally non-pc. Who cried out? Well, certainly not the people who see these conditions. More like those who live in well-to-do neighbourhoods with no unemployed and their alibi immigrant who runs a multi-cultural bookstore. Sarrazin is picking up on this. I do not agree with his idea of "ethnic genes" and I think he should not have said that, nor do I think he should think that. And he is not completely right on everything else either.
But he is doing an important thing: He is actually sparking necessary debates on immigration policy, and the future and identity of this country. These debates have not been led, because all the politically correct opinion holders are too chicken to test their views. Germany must find out if it wants a future as an immigration country, and if it can support such a future either way. There must be a consensus on how to deal with immigrants who resist integration. It is ridiculous that countries whose identities are based on immigration such as Canada or New Zealand have much stricter regulations than Germany does, a country which already had a dense urban population long before it opened its doors for immigrants.
I am certainly not anti-immigration, and I am certainly not nationalist or nativist. I believe however, that it is helping nobody if we close our eyes before obvious problems. And what is certainly not helping is an attitude where phrases such as "immigrants should learn to speak and read the language of the country they are coming to" are marked as racist, and they are here.
Sarrazin is blunt, tactless and rude. But in the current climate of this country, that is the only way left to make people think. And the best way to fight him is checking to see where he is coming from and remove the breeding ground for his ideas. Quite simply, if that is not done, in five years we'll have more than one of his breed.
