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Turkish workers a mistake, claims former German chancellor
Helmut Schmidt, the former German chancellor, has inflamed the country's debate on immigration by saying that multiculturalism can only work under authoritarian regimes, and that bringing millions of Turkish guest workers to Germany was a mistake. "The concept of multiculturalism is difficult to make fit with a democratic society," he told the Hamburger Abendblatt newspaper. He added that it had been a mistake that during "the early 1960s we brought guest workers from foreign cultures into the country". Mr Schmidt, 85, who was the Social Democratic chancellor from 1974 until 1982, said that the problems resulting from the influx of mostly Turkish Gastarbeiter, or guest workers, had been neglected in Germany and the rest of Europe. They could be overcome only by authoritarian governments, he added, naming Singapore as an example.
Yeah. Hitler would have known what to do. Or Stalin. Both made delicious, um, cakes with the human ingredients they inherited. You only find integration in non-authoritarian states. And we don't want integration. We want multicultutalism. Apartheid needs authoritarianism...
Yet many would suggest that Mr Schmidt himself was at least partly to blame for the problems he was raising.
I'd guess he realizes that...
Safter Cinar, a spokesman for Berlin and Brandenburg's Turkish Association, said that bringing people into Germany was not the mistake, but refusing to call it immigration and failing to implement the necessary policies was. He said these errors were made during Mr Schmidt's chancellorship. "When he is talking about mistakes, he is talking about his own mistakes," Mr Cinar said. "They did not bring in the Gastarbeiter because they were feeling generous, it was an economic necessity. "They may argue it was a mistake in 1973 when they put a halt on more Gastarbeiter coming in and another in 1974 when they allowed wives and families to join those who were here. It would have been possible, and legally feasible, to reduce numbers, to send back those who no longer had work. "But if they are allowed to bring their families, that is immigration - and they didn't develop policies for that. And this was when Mr Schmidt was chancellor."
Posted by: Bulldog 2004-11-25
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=49711