Children of Guest Workers - published in 'The Friday Times'

On the eleventh day of rioting in France the trouble spread to Berlin and five cars were torched in Moabit, a working class neighbourhood in northwest Berlin. The working class immigrant districts of Vedding, Moabit and New Cologne were put on high alert and security was beefed up. As I made my way home travelling on the U-Bahn, Berlin’s underground metro, I noticed dogs and security personnel in every train carriage, on the platforms, on the street, giving every person who looked like an immigrant a long and hard look.

I visited the working class neighbourhood of New Cologne a week ago to meet a Turkish friend who had been living there for some time.

"I was born here, I went to school here, I speak German better than I speak Turkish, I have been living here for thirty years now and I still don’t have the citizenship. My passport is still Turkish and my identity is still stated as ‘child of a guest worker"

The hordes of youths that stand around the street corners and outside shops all seem to be not too worried about life. They seem to have a lot of time and not much to do with it. Most are unemployed and it seems that the four year slump in the German economy has hurt them most. Immigrants are usually the first to get fired when job cuts are enforced and the last to get hired. As the number of unemployed hits a post world war two high of five million the German government is in a state of disarray. The outgoing Social Democratic Party has had to come into an unholy alliance with the conservative Christian Democratic Union, which was its primary opponent during the election. This development does not help the immigrants cause because policies will now be much tougher to get approved and implement because of the ideologically split parliament.

Funda Erel, like countless other Turks represents the first and second generation Turkish immigrants and she is bitter about her legal status as the child of a guest worker. In the 1960’s when Germany experienced post war economic boom and the well being of the population was significantly raised there was a severe shortage of people willing to do small jobs. This meant that the average ethnic German was much better off than ever before and was unwilling to do jobs which concerned themselves with municipal operations, cleaning and other low wage occupations. A request was sent by the German government for Labour and turkey responded by sending multitudes of people. Alongside came the famed Turkish fast food-Doners and related businesses and a thriving Turkish community came into being. Identity and cultural ties remained strong with Turkey and Turks chose to live in neighbourhoods which were habited by other immigrants. As time went on North African and Middle Eastern immigrants found haven in these neighbourhoods and this is how the districts of Vedding, New Cologne and Moabit became to be best recognized.

The multitudes that were granted visas for work in Turkey were considered Turkish nationals and were given residence permits which specified their legal status as ‘guest workers’ and the status of their offspring as ‘children of guest workers’. After three decades many are still ‘children on guest workers’. This is the root of the problem.

There exists a strong resentment amongst the immigrant youth against the German system and it appears that the system has turned its back on them. Various integration exercises such as the ridiculous efforts enacted in the UK have been emulated in Germany to similarly disappointing results. The general complaint is that Turks have not integrated into Germany and they shouldn’t really be here, and that there is no ‘social cohesion’ in immigrant areas. Most Germans wouldn’t live in these areas if they could help it. Integration is a two way process and I see a highly polarised society. There does not seem to be a common ground for now as the immigrant youth is seething from years of unemployment and a racism that has not only been experienced on the street but is institutionalised to an extent in the law. Legislation pertaining to security and terrorism is targeted at young Muslim males and that has not been a pleasant experience for many.

Mustafa Gokce works at a Doner Kabab outlet in New Cologne and related that “one day plainclothes police came knocking at my door and wanted to know why I was receiving calls from Afghanistan!” It turned out that Mustafa’s cousin was serving in Afghanistan with the International Security Force and would occasionally call to kill the long hours of idleness at the base in Kabul. Legal sanctioning of measures like phone tapping, interrogation, identity paper spot-checks and computer aided profiling has not won the cause of social cohesion any points at all.

German society is not bursting at the seams yet as France has already begun. There is not much of political or religious agenda behind the immigrants. Mostly they spend their time bickering wit each other and lack a coherent agenda. There are individuals like Hassan Al-Khatib who is a first generation Arab immigrant running a legal advisory service for immigrants. These individual devote the better part of their day dealing with family matters, issues that girls have to face when they experience a sharply dichotomised social structure, youths breaking up into fights with each other, youths resorting to crime, dealing with organized crime and its hold on the immigrant population and representing ‘children of guest workers’ into getting German citizenship rights.

Walking through the district of Wedding at night, I see signs of simmering anger, bitterness and spite against a system that alienates its own. Only a handful of cars have been torched. These immigrants cannot reconstruct their lives back home with ease any longer. It is perhaps only rational for them to stay put where they have worked for decades and contributed to society. As the ethnic German population continues to fall and as economic recovery is expected their will be jobs at some point in the future. Germany along with the rest of Western Europe will need more immigrants to fill in roles and current policies of exclusion will cause only further polarisation. Germany is only simmering but if conditions do not change here, it not tough to imagine a bursting at the seams.