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- [00:00]
A
So we have an extremely selective regime that helps many people who don't need it, that among those who do need help privileges those who are healthy, young, and relatively speaking, wealthy and who leaves many other people alone.
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B
And now the good fight with Jasia Monk. How has migration changed the United States, and how has it changed Western Europe? Why is it that immigrant groups to the United States still seem to integrate a lot better than they do in Western Europe? What is the best predictor as to whether an immigrant will succeed in integrating into their host society? Is it the level of qualification they bring with them? Is it the structure of the labor market and the welfare state in the country to which they arrive? Or is it something to do with the culture of the place in which they were raised? And finally, how should we think about the current system of asylum? Is it a moral state of affairs that should be defended? Or is it actually, in many ways unjust, a lottery which doesn't always reward those who are most in need? To talk about all these subjects, I have invited one of the the leading scholars of migration in Europe and around the world. Rut Koeplantz is a professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, and he also is the director of a research unit on migration and integration at the Berlin Social Science center, the WSET B. In this conversation we also talk about how to respond to all of those things. How do we reform the asylum system to make it more just? Can moderate European parties hear the concerns of the voters in such a way that they remain in charge? Or is the only way that change is going to come to Europe from right wing populist parties like Reform in the UK, Marine Le Pen's party in France, or even the AfD in Germany to listen to that part of the conversation, to support this podcast, to allow us to bring two of these interesting conversations to you every week, and to stop hitting this annoying paywall, please become a paying subscriber. Please go to yashamunk.substack.com and support this podcast. That's yashamunk.substack dot com. Ruth Koopmans welcome to the podcast.
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A
Hi Jasia, nice to be here.
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B
I'm going to start the conversation with an impossibly broad question. You know, European societies were comparatively homogeneous, not as homogeneous as people sometimes claim, and they had all kinds of forms of diversity within them, but certainly were mostly composed of people who had longstanding origins in Europe and mostly in the geography of those nations, you know, 70 or so years ago, and there's been significant levels of immigration since then. How has that transformed the European continent? And how is that experience going?
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A
Yeah, I have to admit I thought for a long time that it wouldn't change Europe very much. Also, you know, we in Europe, we were looking at the experience of classical immigration countries like the US and Canada, and there it seemed to have all worked out well. So my assumption too was that that would also be the case for Europe. But I must say, in the last 15 years or so, and especially since the 7th of October, I think we're seeing that this is actually changing Europe, and not only for the good. I mean, there is definitely a good side to increasing diversity in the sense of, you know, a wider palette of cul choices, more life choice options in general. But there is a dark side to it. And that dark side has become much more visible recently in the form, of course, jihadist attacks, of growing influence of Islamism and religious fundamentalism, partly also of reversals of heartfall thought liberal achievements such as, you know, the possibility, if you're gay to just walk hand in hand with your boyfriend through the city or if you're Jewish, to express your religion without having to fear being mobbed. And in those domains we have seen partial reversals, especially in the larger cities where the percentage of immigrants, of course, has grown to such an extent that those with migration back background in many European cities are now in the majority.
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B
One thing that's striking to me, that was relatively obvious from when I was young and has only become more obvious in some ways since, is the similarities between the experience of immigration in North America and Western Europe, but also these important dissimilarities, and perhaps the most important one of these is that in the United States, if you bet against integration, you just always lose. Samuel Huntington is a political scientist I greatly admire, who has made many contributions to the study of political science before his famous book on clash of civilizations and before his last and most controversial books about Latino immigrants. But he really was wrong in that last book in particular, in which he basically said that Latino immigration to the United States, which has fundamentally transformed the country and there's a risk that English would no longer be the dominant language, and Latinos have these completely different values. And I just think that. But when you look at the trajectory of Latino communities in the United States, and particularly at Latinos who are second and third generation, they are just fully integrated into American life. And many of those fears which Huntington had just haven't materialized. When you look at somebody who's born and raised in the United States, it is very rare for them to seem anything other than just straightforwardly American, and to feel that way and to be treated that way. It is striking that in Europe, in many countries, that isn't the case, that people who are there who were born and raised in Germany or the Netherlands or France or the United Kingdom, sometimes people whose parents or grandparents already arrived there still feel and are still often treated as not truly a member of the society in the same way. What is the explanation of that? Is it just that different historical origin point that American societies are these histories of these kinds of immigration, where the vast majority of the population has a background of migration, as the Germans put it, in their ugly bureaucratic way, at some point? Is it institutions today that make it harder to integrate in Germany than it is to integrate in the United States? Is it cultural attitude? Is it the sort of exclusionary attitudes of a majority? If you agree with the basic diagnosis, what explains it? And if you don't agree with a diagnosis, what did I get wrong?
- [07:50]
A
Well, I agree with your diagnosis that integration is going much more difficult in the European context than in the context of North America. But I think Huntington was not the only one who was mistaken about Latino immigrants. There's a famous article by Ari Zolberg of the New School for Social Research in New York with the title Islam is like Spanish. So making the comparison basically that, you know, the problem of integrating Spanish language immigrants in the United States would be the same as the integration of Muslim immigrants in the European context. And I think that comparison is mistaken on many counts. First of all, on the very simple grounds that languages can be combined. You can have two languages at the same time, so you don't have to give up Spanish in order to learn English. But you cannot be Muslim and non Muslim at the same time. So religion is a much more exclusive identity, and it's also a much more sticky identity. So that's the first one of the
- [09:05]
B
striking findings about language in the United States, if I remember rightly, and you're better up on this literature, is that I think it's something like people who immigrate to the United States often don't learn very good English if they come as adults. If they're not very highly educated, they often do struggle to be fluent in English till the rest of their lives. And in fact, just the other day in Brooklyn, I saw there's a little construction site outside my house and a guy driving a truck, somebody was saying something to him in English and he just couldn't respond. Basically, he didn't speak a word of English and Then I had to find somebody who spoke Spanish to talk to him. The children of immigrants usually are bilingual. They usually speak both languages very, very well, and they usually prefer with their peers to speak English. So even though they're quite fluent in the language, I mean, by the third generation, there's only 1% of people who still speak the language of origin in the United States. So only about 1% of third generation Latinos have any real command of Spanish, which is a shame, actually. It tells you about how easily that transition happens.
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A
Exactly. And that is exactly the same in the European context. So there's really no difference there. It's exactly as you describe it. It goes to that language is a dimension of cultural difference, which is very easy to integrate also because you do not need to assimilate it. Even in the case where people don't learn the language of the country of immigration, they basically only hurt themselves with it. They of course, hurt their chances for social mobility by not speaking English or not speaking German in the German context. But it doesn't bother anybody else because there's no value conflict tied to language. So that makes religion fundamentally different. And you see that also if you look at norms and values. The World Value Survey has mapped cultural values across the world, and there it is very visible. If we look at Latin America, the cultural distance between Latin America and the United States or between Latin America and Europe is relatively small. It is about as large as the cultural distance between Eastern and Western Europe or between Catholic and Protestant countries. In Europe, it's not the same, but these are relatively similar cultures. The big cultural differences are between, say, Western Europe, North America, Australia and sub Saharan Africa and the Muslim world. That's where you find the big cultural differences. And that, of course, makes integrating people who come from countries with a larger cultural distance simply more difficult. And there you have simply the big difference in the composition of the immigrant population in, say, the United States or Canada and Europe. In Europe, Muslim immigrants are a very large part of the immigrant population, whereas they are rather small, almost tiny segments of the immigrant population in Australia or in Canada or in United States. So that's one thing. Secondly, tell us a little bit.
- [12:17]
B
I want to get to the second one, but tell us a little bit about those cultural differences, especially for people who might be more skeptical about cultural arguments in general. I mean, in parts of a debate, saying that some immigrants are more culturally proximate to the majority of population than others is itself seen as my least favorite word in the English language problematic statement. So when you're looking at something like World Value Survey. And you're finding those kind of differences and saying Latin American countries are relatively more similar to North America and Western Europe in terms of cultural attitudes than versus other populations. What kind of questions is this based on? How reliable are these analyses? Tell us a little bit about why we should have confidence in that segment.
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A
Yeah. So these cultural differences show themselves, for instance in attitudes on gender relations, the relations between men and women, whether women should be subordinate to men, whether a typical question being a university education is more important for boys than for girls. For instance, also attitudes towards homosexuality, towards divorce, towards. Towards authority relationships within the family. Whether the most important. Also a typical question, the most important thing for a child is not to disappoint your parents, for instance, or parents should be obedient to their parents. So it's that kind of values.
- [13:52]
B
And to what extent is this a question about stage of economic development as opposed to just different cultural region, presumably? I mean, you know, you live and teach in Germany, for you're from the Netherlands. I grew up in Germany. I mean, you go back to the cultural attitudes about gender in Germany, 40 or 50 years ago, they were much more conservative than they are today. You know, my mom was a single mom who's a musician, who's a conductor. And you know, it was so difficult for her to find ways to make sure that people were looking after me. Because the idea of a German kindergarten in the 1980s in big cities like Munich was open from 10 to 12 in the morning and from 3 to 5 in the afternoon. And that'll allow the mom, who's presumably a housewife, to go shopping without her kid crying and perhaps have a coffee with a friend. And the idea of a working mom was still somewhat culturally suspect. You're talking about in part the Muslim world here. That may be right, but Iran, a comparatively developed country within the Muslim world, has, I believe, more women who are in university today than men. Right. So clearly there's some things here that change. Is that a difference you see even at the same or comparable level of economic development? Or is this simply a question of sort of what economic stage a country is at?
- [15:14]
A
Well, it's both. It's obvious that there is a relationship between a level of socioeconomic development and this kind of values. That's also an important argument in the value in literature on values and modernization theory, etc. But even on the same level of modernization or socio economic development, you find important differences. The countries of the Arabian Peninsula, for instance, are extremely rich, but they still have very conservative Values. Turkey, for instance, is on a level of economic development that is definitely not below and probably above several of the Latin American countries. And still the value distance to Turkey is larger than that to Latin America. So it's a combination of both. And also the countries of East Asia, for instance, south and East Asia, which also are not richer socioeconomically than many of the countries of the Muslim world. They also have values that are closer to Western Europe and North America, for instance. That's one of the aspects that I didn't mention yet. The role of religion in society, the idea of whether religious rules should form the basis of societal organization, whether religious leaders should play an important role in politics, for instance. Again, a typical question in these surveys. And there you see that Southeast and East Asian countries are relatively close to the Western countries, whereas countries of the Muslim world and Sub Saharan Africa tend to be at a greater cultural distance. And if I talk about Sub Saharan Africa, I'm talking partly, of course, also about countries that are in majority Christian. So it's not exclusively a Muslim phenomenon. There's also a very traditional, orthodox kind of Christianity that you can find, especially in Sub Saharan Africa.
- [17:25]
B
Okay, so values is the first explanation you were giving. And then I cut you off to dive into that in more detail. But you had other things on your list, so carry on.
- [17:33]
A
Yeah, well, so the second thing is whether migration has happened primarily selectively on the conditions of the country of immigration, which, you know, have a point system or whatever, a visa system where certain people or a lottery system, as the US Partly has, where, you know, you set certain criteria and certain numbers of immigrants that you allow in on a yearly basis, or immigration that happens spontaneously, basically, non discretionary migration, it is called in the scientific literature, where basically the receiving country does not have the possibility to say no. And that's the case for, on the one hand, refugee and asylum migration, where there is international law that says that somebody who wants to claim asylum has a right of entry and has a right to an asylum procedure, and also has the right to protection against expulsion, which de facto means that most people who come in as asylum seekers, regardless of whether they're accepted or rejected, can stay in the end. And the second important part of non discretionary migration is family migration, where again, we have universal human rights which make it very difficult to limit family migration. And if you then compare Western Europe to the classical immigration countries, you see that the vast majority of immigration to a country like the United States, and even more so Canada and Australia, is discretionary. It's on the conditions and the criteria set by the country of immigration. And the vast majority of migration to Europe is non discretionary. It is asylum migrants and family migrants. And the consequences of this are very visible. If you look at the Turkish population in the United States, it has a higher level of education than the average American. If you look at the Turkish population in Germany or Austria, it has a much lower level of education. Same is true for Nigerians, for instance. Nigerians are a highly educated, a very successful group in the United States. But in Europe, they're a group that you find at the bottom of the ladder because they come in as irregular immigrants. They claim asylum. They usually don't get asylum because there is very little political persecution in Nigeria. They're basically economic migrants. They can stay nonetheless, and they are very often unemployed. And there I come to my third point, but you want to talk about this one first, I'm sure Fox News is now streaming live on Fox 1. When it matters most, turn to the voices you trust. We go beyond the headlines, bringing you the stories you won't hear anywhere else. Live coverage, sharp analysis, real perspective at home or on the go. Stay connected when it counts. Stream FOX News on FOX one Download today.
- [20:46]
B
Yeah, so certainly I think when you look at the success of particular immigrant groups in the United States, the reason is often that they were predominantly H1B migrants. Now, of course, often the children, the grandchildren of H1, whether it's Indian Americans, Nigerian Americans, Pakistani Americans, many of whom have ancestors that originally entered the United states in the 1970s when there was a shortage of doctors, for example, on H1B visas, they even had children who also tended to be successful. Often they were able to bring in other family members through family migration later on. But on the whole, the sibling of a doctor is also going to come from a relatively high social class with relatively high levels of education. So visa are extremely successful immigrant groups. And I think you're right that often when you talk about the most successful countries in terms of integrating immigrants, they tend to be Australia and Canada. Now, what do those two places have in common? It's that they basically have no border which people cross in order to migrate. Australia, because it's an island that's very, very far away from things, you know, Canada because it does have a very large border of the United States. But people generally are happy to remain in the United States. It does not have a large border with Mexico or poorer countries in the region. And so they have historically really selected migrants. Now, to what extent do you think this first point and the Second point are in conflict with each other, which is to say that when you look at Canada, they have invited a lot of people into a country who come from some of those cultures that you say are less proximate to. Canada has a lot of immigrants from the Muslim world. A good amount, I think slightly less, but a good amount of immigration from sub Saharan Africa. But because those are highly selected, because I think something like 2/3 of immigrants to Canada have at least a college degree or perhaps even a higher degree than that, that tends to go very well. So as long as you're selecting on those other criteria, does the degree of cultural fit matter a lot less or do you think that it remains important even if you run a kind of selective point in the way that Canada and Australia does?
- [22:58]
A
Well, it's hard to say because it is not true that Canada has a similar size Muslim population as European countries. So it is difficult to tell in the European context. We're talking about anywhere between 6 and 10% of the population right now that is Muslim. That includes people from Muslim countries, countries that are not Muslim or that are no longer Muslim. So that's a sizable and vastly growing part of the population. In the U.S. canada and Australia, we're talking about 2, 3%. So we're talking about a magnitude of 2 to 3 times less than in Europe. And of course then it's combined with the fact that the highly educated parts of the populations of these Muslim countries tend to be also less strong, strongly religious, more secular oriented. I know Turkey, for instance, quite well because my wife is from Turkey. Also, the Turkish immigrants in the United States, and my brother in law is one of them, they come from a substratum in Turkish society which is very secular. Some of them may call themselves Muslim in name, but they definitely don't adhere to more orthodox or fundamentalist forms of religiosity. So what I just mean to say is that this migration of highly educated elites from these countries is not just selective in the sense that these are more highly educated people that more easily integrate in a socioeconomic sense, but they also tend to be selected in the sense that also culturally they are much more proximate. The global culture of the highly educated elite is very similar in countries across the globe.
- [25:07]
B
Okay, so we've talked about culture, we've talked about selectivity. What about other factors? Does the generosity of a welfare state play a role, for example?
- [25:17]
A
Yeah, exactly. That was precisely the third factor that I wanted to mention that also makes a big difference. So in Europe, of course, at least in Northwestern Europe, we have relatively developed welfare states. Even though there have, of course, been cutbacks since the 19. It is not as extensive as it used to be, but still the level of social welfare provisions is much higher in northwestern Europe than it is certainly in the United States, but even much higher than in Canada or in Australia. And I'm not just talking there about, say, unemployment benefits or social welfare payments, but also the education system and the health system. That's a major factor that, you know, health care in most European countries is very egalitarian in the sense that you do not need to have a private insurance to get good health care. It doesn't cost much money, or it doesn't cost any money to get a good education for your children. If you don't have the money to pay for it yourself. The state provides scholarships. So these welfare states, they offer a lot. And at the same time, of course, they're financed by a relatively high level of taxation compared to North America. And that has two consequences for migration flows, because on the one hand, it makes Europe a very attractive destination for people with low human capital for its low level of education that don't necessarily have the skill sets to be successful in the labor market of a developed country, but who know that, you know, even if I'm not saying now that people migrate in order to become dependent on social welfare, but still, you know that even if you don't find a job, you will still be able to live a relatively decent life, you will still be able to get a good education for your children, and you will will still be able to enjoy a good level of healthcare. At the same time, it makes Europe less attractive for those with a very high level of skills and a very high level of education that is very much sought after on the labor market. Take the proverbial Indian computer engineer. If this person looks at the different options globally for migrating to either Europe or to, say, the United States, well, then the income that I can earn, and certainly the net income after taxes and Social Security payments that I can earn as a highly educated migrant in the United States is much higher than in Europe. So Europe is more attractive to migrants that are more difficult to integrate in the labor market and less. And that's something that Europe is realizing at its own expense right now. It's very difficult for Europe to compete on the global market for highly educated, educated, skilled migrants.
- [28:33]
B
And there's a story in Germany a good number of years ago now when the social democrat green government wanted to give out some visas to attract global talent. And I Think they in fact, talked a lot at the time about Indian IT engineers that they wanted to attract. You know, and because it was hard to get that through in Germany, there was a lot of resistance to it. They ended up with quite onerous restrictions on that visa. And it turned out that all of the people who were able to fill full conditions for that visa also could fulfill the conditions to go to the United Kingdom or the United States or Canada and Australia. And very few of them ended up coming to Germany. And the quota was relatively low for this kind of visa, wasn't filled, if I'm remembering correctly. So you're right about that. I mean, going back to the idea of a welfare state, I've been thinking a lot about how some of the assumptions I had about the world when I was growing up and went to university, in part because they were the assumptions that my professors and smart newspapers and so on sort of gave me, would have been that a more generous welfare state would be better for the integration of immigrants. That if it's easier to access a good education irrespective of how much money your parents have, that's going to make it easier for people who come to a country without means to discover their talents and develop their skills and integrate in the job market. That if the state covers, comes when you arrive and says, hey, we're going to fund a language course for you and that's going to help you to learn the language of a country you're in, that presumably is going to facilitate integration. That having better health coverage means that you're not going to be excluded from full participation in social life because you have some curable disease, and instead you're going to be able to fully participate. Now, you've argued, I believe, that that is not the case. But actually in many ways the lack of any welfare provision like that, particularly perhaps for undocumented migrants in the United States, forces people into the labor market immediately. And that actually means that they're more likely to learn the language, more likely to pick up skills, more likely to become culturally conversant in their new society. And that relatively generous welfare states, particularly of certain European countries, is part of what has led to, to a lot of social isolation among immigrant communities. Tell us about why the instinct that I had as an 18 year old on this and what I think a lot of people in the world still have, perhaps some listeners to this podcast still have, according to you, has turned out to be wrong.
- [31:02]
A
The instinct that you had, or maybe still have, is also the instinct that I had and it's the instinct also that was behind relatively lenient and laissez faire integration policies that Europe originally has. But what people didn't realize, and what I didn't realize also initially is that the welfare state changes the incentive structure for immigrants, especially if immigrants are not highly educated, have a high risk of becoming dependent on welfare benefits, and come from countries with a very low welfare level. So where people are not used to very high aspiration standards. So if we look at the immigration that has taken place to Europe since 2011, 12, since the start of the civil war in Syria and the revolts and civil wars of the Arab Spring in other countries, these were, to a large extent, people with a very low level of education, especially the women among them, often had no education whatsoever or were even illiterate to considerable extents from conservative cultures. Also, where participation of women on the labor market is not a social norm, or actually it's a social norm for women to stay at home. Syria, for instance, is after Yemen, and we're talking now about pre civil war Syria, the country with the second lowest labor market participation of women in the world after Yemen. So if these people would come to the United States with a very low level of welfare provisions, then it would be natural for them to, you know, to do everything they can to be successful in the labor market, to get a job and to earn basically the money they need also to afford education for their children, et cetera. In the European context, what we see happening is that a very large share of these refugees that came in in the last 10 to 15 years are still dependent on social welfare benefits. Women, to the extent that they work, it's only the men who work because of their low level of education. They usually work in jobs where they don't earn enough money according to the welfare standards in a country like Germany to be able to afford. So they get additional welfare payments. Also, with every child that they have, they get more welfare payments so that, you know, you can get thousands of dollars literally a month in welfare payments if you have, you know, a family with a couple of children, that quickly adds up to more than one single person can earn on the labor market if you have a low level of education. So the incentive set is such that it often, often doesn't make sense to look for work. And definitely, if it goes against cultural norms, definitely doesn't make for women to take up a job. So that, I mean, as a theoretical story, both of these scenarios, they make sense, but if you look at the actual data, then it is the Second one, the one about incentive structures of the welfare state, that is the predominant outcome. More than half of the people who are on welfare benefits in Germany and also in the Netherlands are people who are either first or second generation immigrants.
- [34:58]
B
Yeah, I'm very struck here by a comparison that is somewhat surprising, which is that of Soviet Jews. A lot of Soviet Jews left in the late 1980s and early 1990s, both because of significant levels of antisemitism at the time and because of the general chaos of the Russian economy after the fall of communism. And there's a number of them who ended up in Germany and a number who ended up in the United States. And obviously these things are never completely random, but there were relatively comparable populations. And in particular, the populations all had a clear majority of people with not just college degrees, but I believe even postgraduate degrees. Very, very highly educated population from urban centers who had done relatively good job jobs in the Soviet economy. And I believe, if I'm remembering this rightly from a study, I saw many years ago, that about 3% of Soviet Jews who ended up in the United States ended up in long term unemployment. So very, very small number. And something like 60% of Soviet Jews who ended up in Germany ended up in long term unemployment. And the reason for this, in that case was not just the incentives where a more generous welfare state made it much easier for somebody who was perhaps 50 years old at the time of that migration to, say, integrate into this new society. Finding a new job is really difficult. Perhaps I'll just sit at home and while away the years until my retirement. But also the barriers to entry where if you were a professor in the Soviet Union, you could probably become a teacher in the United States relatively easily. It would take you a year to learn the language well enough and a year to get some kind of teaching certificate. And boom, there you were in your education. And in order to become a teacher in Germany, you would have had to go back to first semester of university and do five or seven years or however long it took at the time in order to qualify. Now, the children of those immigrants are very successful in the United States, and they're very successful in Germany as well, because a lot of that educational and social capital ended up traveling down the generations. And they were young enough that they went to German schools and they knew how the system worked, and they ended up doing very, very well. But the contrast between those generations was really striking. The older generation really struggled in the European context. What does that mean? I mean, if you were to design a welfare system from scratch. What elements of it actually help integration? What elements harm integration? Presumably, for example, helping people access language lessons must be a good thing, right? I assume that the state saying, hey, here's a way that you can spend two or three months in a language school actually learning the language of your host country feels like it should be helpful. Having basic access to healthcare feels like it should be positive, even for integration outcomes. But perhaps I'm wrong about that. Which elements do you think actually facilitate integration? And where do you start to get a real trade off between the benefits you're giving to poor and vulnerable people and the counterproductive effect it has on their success in integrating in that society? Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto. Crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com
- [38:19]
A
yeah, I think we're going through an interesting social experiment in Europe now with the migration of Ukrainians, because there, the approach that Germany has chosen is quite different from that of some other European countries, for instance, the Netherland. So in the Netherlands, the idea is you should get a job as soon as you can. In Germany the idea is, no, you should first learn the language and we pay for the language course. And during the time of your language course, you also don't have to take up work. You have a right to social welfare. And what we are seeing now is the level of labor market participation of Ukrainians in Germany, even after a few years, is much lower than it is in the Netherlands. And actually in most other European countries, of course, the jobs that Ukrainians then have, it's mostly Ukrainian women, of course, that they then have in countries such as the Netherlands, are not necessarily jobs on their level of qualifications because they don't know the language yet. And they may not have precisely the same educational credentials that are needed. Although Ukraine is quite close, of course, in its educational standards to Western Europe. So that does not play that much of a role. So the question is maybe in the very long run the German strategy might pay off. If you would look at this as a form of permanent migration. But if you're looking at it from the point of view that this is a refugee population and that hopefully many of these Ukrainians can soon go back to their country, then it's actually better to make them work and be part of society. And in doing so, of course, they also learn the language and they make friends, they make social contacts. So what happens in the German context is often that people are very long, for a very long time in these language courses, which turn out to be also not very efficient in actually teaching people the language, because there are no sanctions on not completing the course or not completing it at a sufficiently good level. So again, if the incentive is not there that after completing the language course you will actually able to earn more money in a job than you already earn with your social benefits for yourself, for your wife and for your children, then we still have the problem of the incentive structure regardless of the language course. And it becomes also a disincentive actually to do your best in the language course or even to attend, because these courses in Germany, they are free and still they have a problem of lack of attendance. So there's a discussion of whether we should sanction people for not going to the free language course. That's ridiculous.
- [41:30]
B
Well, and having learned a number of languages in my life, certainly a well taught language course can be helpful, particularly if the students in the course are all from different backgrounds, so that you have to use the local language as the lingua franca amongst you. But when it's not well taught, it doesn't help very much, even to somebody who's very motivated to learn. When all of the students in the class actually share the same language and probably the moment that the formal lesson is over, they talk to each other in the native tongue, which is natural. I've certainly found that what's much more helpful to learning a language is being in situations where you have to use it because. Because you are communicating with a friend, a boss, a co worker, somebody in a service profession, the conductor of a bus or a tram from whom you have to buy a ticket. And so even just for language learning, you're right that being thrown into a job may be a more efficient way of teaching a lot of people than sitting around in a classroom like that. What about the other question that always comes up for good reason when you compare it? Bring the integration of Ukrainians into those societies to that of other people. I mean, one difference obviously is that because Ukrainian men are not allowed to leave the country for obvious military reasons, the influx of Ukrainians has mostly been women and children. Whereas because of the structure of the asylum system, that basically means you get asylum if you make a perilous journey across the Mediterranean, most of the asylum seekers who are right in Europe are young men. And so those are two very different groups. There's also a cultural difference here, right? To what extent is the receiving society more open to Ukrainians than it might be to people who come from Syria, who come from Nigeria. And more broadly, what is the role of discrimination in some of those labor market outcomes? I know that there's one sort of well established research program in sociology where you send cv these two employers with different names, identical experience, identical grades, identical whatever, but one name would indicate Thomas Mustermann is the name that Germans, for whatever reason, use for the standard German. So it indicates that it's probably somebody who is born and raised in Germany with German ancestry. And then you send a CV which indicates that somebody likely has, you know, roots in Turkey or in Syria or Nigeria or somewhere that's, you know, recognizably not a German sounding name. And it tends to be the case that people with German sounding names get higher number of invitations to job interviews, et cetera. Do you buy that literature? How large does that affect? How much of the different integration and labor market outcomes does that actually explain?
- [44:17]
A
Yeah, you actually asked two different questions. So the first question was the more specific one about the different perceptions and treatment of Ukrainians versus other migrants. The second question is a more general question about discrimination. So let me maybe first answer the first question because there I think it's definitely true that people, certainly initially it's shifting a little bit now it takes longer the war in Ukraine, but still the perception and the willingness also to make sacrifices for Ukrainian immigrants is definitely larger than for immigrants from, say, Western Africa or the Middle East. But there is also a good reason for that, namely that Ukrainians are fleeing into the European Union directly from a war zone. So it's very obvious when the war started in Ukraine, it was very. And you know, the Russians were all over the place. Bombs were falling on Ukrainian cities. Ukrainians were fleeing en masse over the Polish borders and then on to Germany. It was very clear that these were people who were directly fleeing from an armed aggression and that Europe was the first country or the first continent basically that could come to their aid. And that's a different situation than the one that we're facing in relation to, say, people from Afghanistan or from Syria, where people come to Europe not directly from the war zone, but via at least one, and in many cases several countries where they already had found refuge from political persecution or from war. The Syrians who came to Europe in large numbers in 2015 were to a large extent already since years in, in Turkey. So that is of course not the same situation as that of the Ukrainians, where really, you know, to close the borders to Ukrainians at that Moment would have been the same as, you know, closing the doors which Europe actually did to Jews in the 1930s. So it is a different situation. So. But let's now get to the more general question about discrimination, whether I buy that literature. Well, I'm actually part of that literature. So I did that kind of research myself also, and I was actually part of the first cross nationally comparative study of labor market discrimination. And there are two interesting results from that literature. From a cross national perspective, if I were to ask you, what do you think is the level of labor market discrimination higher in Germany or in the United States, what would you you answer?
- [47:32]
B
Well, I would have answered Germany, which makes me think that the true answer is the United States.
- [47:36]
A
Yeah, it's true. And also within Europe, the highest level of. We did a five country study. The countries that we included were Norway, Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Germany. United Kingdom was the country with the highest level of labor market discrimination. And we compare.
- [47:54]
B
This is relevant because those are the countries that actually have done comparatively better
- [47:58]
A
at integrating immigrants than they supposedly are, the ones that are more inclusive. And Germany always has the bad image of, oh, this is the ethnic nation, et cetera. But it turns out that actually of those countries, the lowest level of labor market discrimination was in Spain. But second was Germany. And it's not just our study that shows that ours was unique in the sense that we had exactly the same design and the same immigrant groups that we could compare across five countries. But also, if there have been previous meta studies that basically bring together the results of various national level labor market discrimination studies, and they showed the same thing. Very high levels of discrimination in the United States, very high levels of discrimination in the United Kingdom, moderate levels in countries such as the Netherlands or Sweden. Also countries that traditionally have had a relatively multicultural, inclusive integration policy, and the lowest levels in countries like Germany and Austria. So the ideas that people, the cliche images that people have about discrimination, they are often not accurate. And if you're then looking, I mean, what our study for Germany, for instance showed is that there's also not significant discrimination against all immigrant groups. There are many immigrant groups that do not suffer significant discrimination or no discrimination at all. That's of course, that's not surprising. Maybe true for immigrants who come from other European countries, but it's also true for immigrants who come from East Asian countries or from Latin America, at least in the European context. It is not true for immigrants who come from Muslim majority countries, and it's not true for immigrants who have a black facial phenotype so there is discrimination against Muslims and there's discrimination against black blacks in the European context.
- [50:11]
B
And in Europe you often include pictures of yourself.
- [50:15]
A
Well, not in all countries, but in the German context that is possible. And also in the Netherlands it's possible. And in those countries we did find that a black phenotype led to discrimination, not to very high levels of discrimination. I should also say we actually found that.
- [50:32]
B
I was going to ask what is the magnitude of this effect? Does this mean that you have to spend send six CVs rather than five CVs in order to get one callback for interview? Or does it mean that you have to send 20 CVs rather than one CV in order to get a callback for interview? I mean, how big of an actual difference does that make in terms of your likely rate of success?
- [50:51]
A
Yeah, a relatively small difference. In the context of Germany where we're talking about, I think we had in our study over, we had eight different professions and we had an overall invitation rate of about 52% or so. And among these discrimination groups, discriminated groups, so blacks and Muslims, we were talking about 45% so it's lower. But still there was a very fairly high chance to be invited. Also if you had an application letter which indicated that you were Muslim or a photo that indicated that you were black.
- [51:28]
B
And is there any change over time in this? Has this effect gone up or down over time as far as we know, or is the literature not clear on that?
- [51:35]
A
Well, the studies that I know for Germany, they show that it is relatively constant. So it has never been very large in Germany. We have several studies going further back in the past about discrimination against Turks and that has always been at a relatively. It's there, it is definitely significant and therefore it's unacceptable. Let's be clear about that. To not invite people for a job interview just because of their ethnic background or their race or their religion is not a good thing. But it is not something that contributes in a very major way to the chances of success on the labor market of immigration, at least in continental European countries. I'm not sure about the UK and I'm also not sure, as I say said about the United States. It may well be that it's much more significant there. But in the European context it's also something, if you look at survey, that's of course the other way to study labor market discrimination is to look at the so called ethnic penalty. So you basically look at levels of employment of people and then try to explain that with level of Education with age, gender, with factors of which we know that they generally contribute to labor market success. And usually there's a difference that remains between ethnic groups, which is often referred to as the ethnic penalty. But in a study that I did, I looked in addition to cultural factors, I looked at self reported language knowledge, I looked at the amount of inter ethnic social contacts that people reported. So whether they're circle of friends and their family consisted of people only of their own ethnic group or also of people of the country of immigration. And I also looked at values about the participation of women in social life, including on the labor market. And if you include these cultural factors, you can actually explain away the remaining difference between majority ethnics. And in this case the study was about Muslim four different Muslim immigrant groups. So it is education, social capital and demography plus cultural difference that explains the gap in labor market participation. And we additionally asked people about their discrimination experiences and found actually that it had no explanatory value for their labor market outcomes.
- [54:29]
B
So how likely people are to say that they've been discriminated against doesn't correlate with a success in the labor market. Since you mentioned, you know, Turkish immigrants to Germany, for a little bit of context, you know, the German government in the 1960s, when there was need for a lot of unskilled labor in German factories, made a contract with the Turkish government and basically invited a lot of people from Turkey into the country. A lot of the time this was people from poorer regions of Turkey. Often it was people who were not in employment at the time. They were meant to be gezed workers, which is the German term for this gasta, who would stay for a number of years, then go back. Of course, by and large they ended up staying in Germany, or at least a certain person ended up staying in Germany and then bringing family members with them. And today Turkish immigrants to Germany are, I assume, the biggest immigrant group in Germany and remain so there was certainly the most visible immigrant group when I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s. When talked about immigration to Germany and integration and successes and failures, really you were talking about Turks in Germany by and large. Now you go to, I believe the year 2010 and a man by the name of Tilo Zaratin writes a book that is a huge bestseller, rather dry read I have to say, called Germany is Abolishing Itself Deutschland Shaftzig up, in which he's claiming that this Turkish minority in particular really hasn't integrated very well, has very bad labor market outcomes. He made some very controversial Claims about the average IQ of Turkish immigrants being lower than that of other groups. And this was really the center of a debate, right? I mean, it was a giant debate about this book. I mean, it's hard for me to think of a Anglophone equivalent. Perhaps some of the furor around Jordan Peterson comes close to it, but it was really less in magnitude, I think. Now what's interesting is that in 2015 you have the beginning of a refugee crisis. Angela Merkel says so famous Wirschafenders will do, will make it work. You have very high levels of people coming into Germany and other European countries from Syria and Afghanistan, as well as sub Saharan Africa. And what I find interesting is that in the decades since then, two things have happened. The first is that the kind of political consensus around asylum policy has really shifted. And I want to get back to that in a moment. But whereas in 24 2015, even the rightmost party in the Bunistag at the time, which was the Christian Democrats, were saying, no, we need to welcome people to our country and had effectively an open border policy, at least in rhetoric, if not always in fact, today I would say it's nearly the inverse. Virtually every political party in Europe says that something like 2015 shouldn't be repeated, even if they sometimes don't quite admit to the extent to which they've changed their mind and those 10 years. The second thing has happened, which I think is interesting, which is that Turks have really fallen out of the debate over migration in Germany today. When you're talking about integration and challenges of integration, it really is about people who came to a country from Syria, from Afghanistan, to a lesser extent from sub Saharan African countries, and the question of the integration of what remains, I think, the largest immigrant group to Germany, and certainly certainly the one that has been of longer standing and the one that was at the very center of public attention until about 15 years ago. So it doesn't exist anymore. And so I just want to go back to that and ask you, how is this Turkish minority group in Germany during have they integrated over time? Is the news more positive over the long run than it may seem to be over the short run, and in a certain kind of way may paradoxically relate us with immigration, have helped Turkish Germans to be seen as, quote, unquote, comparatively better immigrants since of more long standing, more likely to be integrated, more likely to speak German perfectly because they're now second, third, fourth, fifth generation Germans. What's happening to that strand of the story that has been dropped from salience in the public in quite a remarkable way over the last 10 years.
- [58:48]
A
Yeah, there's always such a thing as an ethnic hierarchy. And of course, prior to the refugee crisis of 2015, Turks were at the bottom of the perceived hierarchy. And to some extent also objectively still the immigrant group, even, you know, four decades after the end of the guest worker period, they were indeed still doing quite badly in terms of welfare dependence, in terms of school success, of children of the second and third generation generation. But it's definitely the case that nowadays people don't talk much about the Turks anymore. That is partly, of course, because there is increasing integration as the generations replace each other. The third generation is doing a little bit better than the second and the second was doing better than the first. So objectively, there has been some improvement. But the major development, of course, is that since then, about 3 million people, not counting the Ukrainians, so I'm also only talking about non Ukrainian refugees, have come to Germany who are doing much worse than the Turks in terms of labor market participation. And that is something, I think that is new compared to Turkish migration, is that these new immigrant groups are also very strongly overrepresented in crime statistics. And of course, we have seen the problem of jihadi violence, which is also something that has never. Even though Turks still are by far the largest Muslim group in Germany, there have been very, very few attempts or succeeded Islamist attacks where the perpetrators were of Turkish origin. Whereas most of the attacks that have happened, and that's not just true in Germany, but also in other European countries, have been committed by people who came in as refugees since 2010. So people from Afghanistan, from Somalia, from Syria, from Iraq, to some extent, also from the Maghreb countries. Tunisia, for instance, the perpetrator of the attack on the Christmas market here in Berlin was a Tunisian. Morocco also. So that, of course, has brought these more recent immigrants groups much more to the forefront of the political debate. And it has, of course, improved the relative standing of Turks and who were then, of course, looked at as an option, very successful immigrant group. But I think many Germans now long for the days when they had to deal with the problems of Turkish immigration, which in hindsight weren't nearly as bad as people maybe thought at the time.
- [62:05]
B
So in terms of relative standing, I think that that's clearly the story and it's relatively straightforward. What about in terms of absolute standing? And when you look at the population of people of Turkish origin in Germany today, how integrated are they? How well are they doing? You know, most of them now firmly in the German middle class you know, after, you know, 60 or so years of, you know, immigration from Turkey to Germany, can we have a more positive overall assessment of this than we might have done 20 years ago? Or how would you say, you know, irrespective of that comparison to the more newly arrived groups, you know, is it a positive impact? Is it a mixed image or is it a worrying image?
- [62:47]
A
I think it's a mixed image in several senses. First of all, of course, it's very difficult to generalize about such a large group. Of course, there's a subset of the Turkish population, Turkish origin population, that is very successful. Some of the most important entrepreneurs in, in Germany are of Turkish origin, famously
- [63:17]
B
the founders of one of the companies
- [63:18]
A
that produced the vaccine, the COVID vaccine. So there are, and of course in the culture sector in sports. So there are many, many examples of extremely successful integration. But the majority of people of Turkish origin, also in the second and third generation of, are still, say, working class, definitely not part of the middle class, and they are still very much overrepresented in the statistics on welfare dependence. And their children are still doing comparatively badly in school. So it's not an overall success story. So it's mixed to that extent. And secondly, of course, there has been progress on the socioeconomic front. So educational success is definitely better than it was 20 years ago. Labor market position is also definitely better than it was 20 years ago. But politically and culturally, the development has partly been in the other direction. And that is a result of developments in Turkey itself. Because the turkey of 20 years ago is also not the same as the Turkey. Turkey of today. The Turkey of today has been ruled now for several decades by an Islamist party and now an Islamist dictator, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who not only has changed Turkey, and not for the better, I mean economically, maybe for the better, but in a political and social cultural sense, definitely not. But of course, through the influence that Turkey has on the Turkish population living in Germany, through mosques, through media, that has also had its effects on the Turkish origin population in Western Europe. And if you look at since a couple of years, Turks abroad. So the diaspora also has the right to vote in parliamentary and presidential elections in Turkey and the vote for the AKP party. So the Islamist party of Erdogan is higher among Turkish origin immigrants living in Western Europe than it is in Turkey proper. And that's of course a part of the story of Turkish integration that has not gone in a positive direction because that was actually better and also perceived better in the pre Erdoan times where Turkey was proud of its secular heritage, was still standing firmly in the tradition of Mustafa Kemal Atat Turk, separation of church and state, etc. So social, culturally, I would say Turkish immigration is viewed to some extent more problematic, and rightly so, than it was 20 years ago.
- [66:21]
B
So we've sort of inched up to this question a few times, but I want to make sure that we actually get a chance to talk about this important subject in this conversation as well. How should we think about the current asylum system? I'm struck by the fact that in a lot of conversations, there's a kind of background assumption that there's something moral about the current asylum system, that it is something that protects people in a good way, and that if you're criticizing it, it must be because you're heartless. And yet it strikes me that many elements of the system are actually deeply unjust, that there's many very needy people around the world who were not helping at all, all at the moment, that basically we're incentivizing people to raise US$10,000 or so to spend on criminal gangs that help bring them to Europe, that we're incentivizing them to make a very perilous journey across the Mediterranean, which tragically often leads to people's deaths, and that often, when they arrive, we leave them in legal limbo for a long time about whether or not they're going to be able to stay and fully participate in society.
- [67:32]
A
I think to understand how the asylum system has, I think, you may say, degenerated into what it currently is, you have to understand its origins. The asylum and refugee system was created after the Second World War to prevent that we would ever get a repetition of what happened in the 1930s in Europe when Jews tried to flee Nazi Germany and they were told at the Swiss or at the Dutch border, you know, we've already taken up 10,000 Jews last year. The border is closed, and people were sent back to Nazi Germany. And many of these people died in the concentration camps. So in order to prevent that from happening again, the international community agreed initially, actually only with a geographical reference to Europe in the Geneva Convention, that countries were obliged to give people access who were asking for asylum, to give them access to an asylum procedure, to establish whether they were really in need of protection, and also to grant them protection from the non refulment principle, it's called. So states are not allowed to send people back to countries where they are threatened with persecution. And that was an international rule that was created for a world in which people fled over relatively small distances from Germany to Switzerland, from Germany to the Netherlands, to a border bordering country. And sometimes that still happens. We talked earlier about Ukraine. That is what happens in the case of the Ukraine, Ukrainians fleeing over the Polish border. That is the classical situation for which the Geneva Convention was created. But of course, meanwhile, we live in a world where people travel over long distances. People know also about countries at the other end of the world. There are airplanes. Airfares have become relatively cheap, and if you can cannot afford an airplane ticket, then you can travel in other ways. So the world has become much more connected. People also now have relatives or friends living in other countries of the world. So there are also social connections. So in this world, we're now in a situation where we have an asylum, right, that was meant actually for people fleeing from neighboring countries that is now being used by people that can be used actually, but by everyone, everywhere in the world. And you can travel through as many countries as you would like. You still have the rights to asylum at the moment that you arrive in Europe. And now comes, of course, the second part that makes it immoral. Who can indeed afford to make these long journeys and who can afford the money to pay the smugglers that you need on that journey? Who is young, healthy and male enough to be actually able to survive that strenuous journey over mountains, through deserts, and across the Mediterranean or the Atlantic? Well, those are young, healthy males from families that have at least enough money to pay the smugglers and that then arrive in Europe and that don't necessarily come from countries where there is actually political persecution and where there is actually civil war. Because in the end, everybody has the right to claim asylum. And because we have such high barriers to expulsion, it is usually not possible to return people to their countries of origin, even if their asylum claim is rejected. And at the same time, there are millions of refugees in the world who are. Are in dire need of protection, who don't have the means to travel to Europe, or who are stuck in countries like Yemen or Myanmar that are too far apart from any of the wealthy countries of the world and where people are much too poor to be able to travel to Europe, or for that matter, even less so to travel to the United States or to Canada or to Australia. So we have an extremely selective regime that helps many people who don't need it, that among those who do need help, privileges, those who are healthy, young and, relatively speaking, wealthy, and who leaves many other people alone. And then I don't even talk about all the people who die on the way into the European asylum system. Of all the people who die on migration world, these are data from the International Office for Migration. 70% of these people die on the way to Europe, on the way to the European asylum system, because these are not labor migrants. They're not invited migrants. These are people who know and are told by smugglers how the European asylum system works. And that leads many people from West Africa, from countries where there aren't very high levels of political persecution, where there are no civil wars, to travel to Europe, to cross the Mediterranean. Many die, are exploited, are enslaved, are mutilated, et cetera, in the Sahara. Those who survive try to make it across the Mediterranean. Thousands die every year in the Mediterranean, but they do so because they know that once you're in Europe, you have a 90% plus guarantee that you can also stay in Europe. So this is a perverse system that, that, that, you know, that doesn't help those who need our help most, and that also lures many people to risk their lives, basically.
- [74:00]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, we talk about what to do about all of this. How do we reform an asylum system that, as Ruth argues, is much less just than it seems? And how more broadly can governments actually get a control of their border? How can they listen to the concerns of the voters about the current structure and pattern of migration without ending migration altogether? To listen to that part of the conversation, to support this podcast, to stop hitting this annoying paywall, to feel good about yourself, go to jasamung.substack.com and become a paying subscriber. I'm very grateful to your support@yashamunk.substack.com.
- [74:55]
A
Sam.