Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [129]
In the first years of the twenty-first century, the German government began to awaken to the problem in its midst. It became apparent that Turks, and other immigrants, would have to be permanent: With its low birth rates, the German population would fall from 82 million to less than 60 million by 2050, leading to the collapse of the country’s pension and social-security system and a dramatic decline in living standards for everyone. The government realized that the “guest” Turks, many of them with German-born grandchildren by now, were both a problem and a solution. In 2000, after 20 years of fruitless parliamentary debate, Germany finally amended the Foreigners Act of 1965, introducing the possibility of naturalization for German-born children of immigrants. A path to citizenship was now available to their parents if they had stayed for eight years with legal employment. And, for the first time, Germany introduced jus soli, the right of citizenship to those born to parents who resided legally in Germany.
This well-intended policy ended up having the opposite of its desired effect. Studies show that the naturalization rate of Turks in Germany peaked in 1999, a year before the new citizenship law, after which the number of Turks becoming German actually declined.24 Through two seemingly innocuous clauses in its law, Germany had created an awkward Catch-22 for its Turks. First, it required those seeking citizenship to have been employed in formal, legal jobs—a reasonable policy if it had been in effect in 1961, but one that, after Turks had spent almost four decades building gray-market economies within their arrival cities, forced them either to abandon their livelihoods or to avoid citizenship. Second, it required that naturalized Turkish Germans abandon their Turkish citizenship after the age of 23. This ignored the cultural reality of the arrival city, the importance of its links to the village, both for the social security of the residents and for the village itself through remittances. Rather than bringing their status in line with their actual lives, Germany ended up forcing the Turks to choose between their established, precarious, but workable lives of non-citizenship or complete abandonment of those networks and institutions in exchange for legal citizenship.
This is not just a problem in Germany. It is even more acute in the states and cities of the Persian Gulf, notably Dubai, where only 17 percent of the emirate’s 1.4 million people are citizens. The remainder, three-quarters of whom come from the Indian subcontinent, include some short-term workers but also large numbers of people who have been residents for years or decades, who have formed families and deep ties to the economy but have no legal right to own property or seek health care, pensions, or other benefits and no incentive to become taxpayers and participants in the culture and development of the city. As the economy has slowed and unemployment has risen, there have been signs of a pending German-style crisis.
German policy is still changing, and the pressure of a growing bloc of successful Turks—a group that includes members of the Bundestag and prominent cultural and media figures—may end up transforming the German arrival city into a functioning reality, at least for the third generation of Turkish Germans. It is hard to avoid the sense that places like Kreuzberg could have played a far more important role in German society, rivaling famous arrival cities like Brick Lane,