Abstract
This chapter presents results from our empirical study based on qualitative interviews conducted with Turkish–German migrants and their significant others in both countries. After introducing the historical background on migration in Turkey and Germany, we describe, by means of a typology, the great variety of transnational contacts, activities, and orientations with respect to different migrant categories, migrants’ life courses, and different areas of action. An important result of this study is that stronger state border-crossing activities and orientations usually are embedded in even stronger intercultural and incorporation-related practices toward the migrants’ respective resident states
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- 1.
The most obvious example is that we did not have any access to closed communities of Islamic sects.
- 2.
We would like to thank the British team of the TRANS-NET consortium, Filippo Osella and Kaveri Harriss, for encouraging us to adhere to this basic distinction between transnationalism and multiculturalism, during discussions at project meetings.
- 3.
Multiculturalism, in a narrower sense, is often associated with normative theories of intercultural justice for ethnic or other minorities (Taylor 1992; Kymlicka 1995). According to the general thesis of multicultural citizenship, the established “color-blind” institutional framework of liberal democratic states, which grant individual and formal rights irrespective of the particular characteristics and identities of persons (such as ethnicity and gender) is insufficient to fully accommodate ethnic and national minorities because these institutions, as well as the political cultures, are biased in favor of the dominant classes or the majority’s ethnicity and religion. Because of this, multicultural theorists argue for providing group-differentiated rights as an extension of formal citizenship, such as exemption rights for minority religious practices within official institutions and special representation rights for cultural minorities.
- 4.
That is somewhat similar to “New Assimilation Theory,” which describes a multicultural “remaking of the mainstream” in the US context (Alba and Nee 2003).
- 5.
For instance, the term foreigners has been changed to persons with a migration background and the former commissioner of foreigners has been re-titled integration commissioner. The Christian Democrats in their party platform now call Germany a country of integration (CDU 2007: 88) in order to outdo the “Germany is a country of immigration” catchphrase with which they were criticized in previous decades by nearly all the other parties for their migration-restrictive position and their insinuated ethnocultural understanding of Germany’s culture.
- 6.
One important aspect of these fundamentally altered perceptions is that the importance of integration in official discourse is often illustrated by enumerating the real numbers of so-called “persons with migration background” as about 15 million people, amounting to one fifth of Germany’s population and with an even higher share among the younger generation.
- 7.
The most obvious (neo-)assimilationist aspect of the German understanding of integration concerns the widely held conception that it is mainly the individual migrants, who have to endeavor to adapt to German society, especially by acquiring German language as well as other competencies and educational achievements, which are deemed to be necessary preconditions for their employability (Gerdes 2010; Schönwälder 2010).
- 8.
In official party discourse, multiculturalism is largely portrayed as an endorsement of ethnically segregated societies and the opposite of integration as well as the absence of integration policy (Schönwälder 2010).
- 9.
For example, it has often been noted that social practices and cultural understandings in Turkey are different from those of Turkish communities in Germany. That the practices and institutions of Turkish migrants in Germany are characterized by a self-perpetuating dynamic, very different from what is going on in Turkey, was also stressed by some of our interviewees.
- 10.
The issue of durability of transnational social spaces, in relation to the question of their newness, has often been a matter of controversy within related debates (Kivisto 2001).
- 11.
- 12.
There are some studies that explain transnational political practices and orientations as a mere consequence of the political opportunity structures and immigrant integration regimes in immigration states (Koopmans and Statham 2003; Koopmans et al. 2005). In these studies, a disproportionate share of transnational political claims-making among migrants in Germany has been attributed to Germany’s more restrictive model of immigrant inclusion.
- 13.
Our findings in this respect corroborate previous studies, which also found a relatively high participation rate of Turkish migrants in Germany in voluntary activities in civil society (Halm and Sauer 2005). See our section on social engagement.
- 14.
For example, the most influential assimilation theory in Germany (Esser 2001) assumes from a rational choice perspective that in the face of always scarce resources (such as attention, time, learning capacities, social contacts, money) an investment in ethnic or transnational contexts will lead to a corresponding lack of resources in the national context.
- 15.
It should be noted that these patterns of political activity can be, to an important extent, related to the (however fundamentally changed) political opportunity structure in Germany. This is because the issue of immigrant integration became one of the top issues, since the political debates on the new German immigration law from 2001 onward, and nowadays is viewed, above party lines, as a multilevel and cross-sectional task, including the promotion of so-called “diversity management” programs (Gerdes 2010). Additionally, there are a multitude of new possibilities for so-called “persons with a migration background” to work, voluntarily or professionally, in different organizations as contact persons mediating between migrant milieus and communities and German authorities and institutions.
- 16.
For this reason, we treat the issue of citizenship not as something relating exclusively to the political domain, but rather as a theme that cuts across the different domains we are dealing with, based on the significance of citizenship from the perspectives of our interviewees.
- 17.
However, in contrast to other accounts of economic transnationalism (Vertovec 2009), we left aside economic remittances, which we consider in the sociocultural domain under the heading of transnational social engagement. The primary reason for this is that we are mostly concerned with individual activities rather than with their aggregated effects. From the perspective of individual actors, economic-occupational decisions and remittances relate to different logics of actions, which should not be confused by incorporating them in the same domain of analysis. Although remittances are usually based on some kind of moral commitment and carried out within contexts of reciprocity or solidarity, decisions regarding work and occupations are, at least to a higher probability, a matter of individual self-interest.
- 18.
Because our sample in general comprises a disproportionately large share of migrants having graduated from high school or even university, this probably also contributed to our results concerning a high share of transnationally active migrants in this domain.
- 19.
These cases indicate that ethnic entrepreneurship need not necessarily result in an “ethnic mobility trap,” as some assimilation theories argue (Goebel and Pries 2006). In particular, Turkish immigrants of the second or third generation, who were successful within the German education system, offer knowledge-based services, such as tax and legal advice, for customers of Turkish background (Institut für Mittelstandsforschung 2005: 11). Even if some migrant entrepreneurs might feel relegated to very specific market and customer segments, many others regard their ethnicity as an extension of their opportunities in terms of choice and action (Pütz 2004: 211).
- 20.
Because of this complexity, the identity dimension deserves further analysis and interpretation beyond this report.
- 21.
Concerning citizenship, especially the fact that Germany still does not accept dual citizenship officially and legally, but also the fact that Turkish migrants had to get dual citizenship before Germany’s citizenship law reform in 2000 and have the possibility to receive the so-called “pink card” as a reduced kind of Turkish citizenship, seem to have led to a broad spectrum of very different individual responses.
- 22.
However, it is important to note that our recruitment strategy of respondents did not include systematic efforts to incorporate members of religious communities. Identifications as Muslims would probably be much more frequent if we could also access Islamic communities of different kinds.
- 23.
That education as well as German language acquisition in early childhood is nowadays regarded as the “key to integration” has many different reasons, among them, most importantly, the perceived transformation to service-based economies and so-called “knowledge-based societies,” which are deemed to reduce opportunities for low-skilled or unskilled labor.
- 24.
See the report of the OECD’s Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA) in 2001.
- 25.
The purported explanations for these inequalities in educational attainment relating to ethnic backgrounds are very different. Although the dominant political discourse attributes the failure in significant part to the migrants themselves, scientific explanations range from institutional discrimination in schools (Gomolla and Radtke 2002; Kristen 2006) to the individual qualification deficits of young migrants like the absence of German language skills (Esser 2006). However, cross-country comparisons provide at least strong indications for the significant influence of the German education system, whose institutions were and still are obviously less prepared to accommodate the educational needs of migrant children. For example, compared with second-generation Turks in other European countries, those in Germany are clearly disadvantaged. For example, “only 3% enter higher education in Germany, as compared to almost 40% in Sweden and France” (Crul and Schneider 2010: 1258).
- 26.
- 27.
A perspective which combines both the dimension of intensity and extensity of transnational practices can be found in Levitt (2001, especially Table 1).
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Gerdes, J., Reisenauer, E., Sert, D. (2012). Varying Transnational and Multicultural Activities in the Turkish–German Migration Context. In: Pitkänen, P., Içduygu, A., Sert, D. (eds) Migration and Transformation:. International Perspectives on Migration, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3968-0_4
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