Germany Home to Fewer Foreigners

The Commissioner for Integration, Marieluise Beck published a report on Thursday which clearly shows the fall in the overall number of migrants knocking at Germany's door.

The report says that the number of foreigners has fallen from 7.3 million in 2003 to 6.7 million in 2004, meaning they now make up just eight percent of the total population of the country.

But one of the major reasons for the decline is an increase in the number of people born to foreign parents taking on German citizenship.

One quarter of all children born in Germany have at least one non-German parent, and a million of them have assumed German citizenship over the past five years.

Integration is key

Marieluise Beck said a big challenge facing Germany is integration, particularly in the case of children whose lack of German language skills often put them at a social disadvantage.

"If the children of immigrants are to be able to make full use of their potential, we shall need enormous effort by educators. At the moment, we're failing them," she said.

On Thursday, German Interior Minister Otto Schily also spoke out in favor of young foreigners living in Germany. At the conference of interior ministers, he proposed granting children and youths who had been living in Germany for more than six years, the chance to stay even if their parents were sent home under repatriation programs.

He said children who had grown up here and perceive it as their home should not have to be uprooted just because their parents have to leave.

Regulating immigration of Jews

But,it's not only the overall immigrant statistics that are relevant to the political agenda of the day.

This week, the tricky issue of the integration of Jews from the former Soviet Union seemed on its way to a resolution.

The Central Council for Jews in Germany has agreed to implement tighter immigration controls on East European Jews wishing to enter the country. After almost a year of negotiations with Interior Minister Otto Schily, the Central Welfare Agency of Jews in Germany has agreed to a system of checking whether or not Jews who come to Germany from former Soviet states, do in fact practice the Jewish faith.

In an interview with the Berliner Zeitung newspaper, Albert Meyer of the Central Council for Jews in Germany said he approved of the measures, which will, however, be difficult to implement because immigrants often don't have the necessary documents to prove their identity according to the strict religious laws.

The proposed regulations, which Schily will present at the conference of interior ministers on Friday would make it compulsory for immigrants entering Germany to learn the language.

Thus far, Jews from the former Soviet Union have had unchallenged access to come to Germany, making it an attractive idea. Almost 200,000 have come over the past 14 years.

But the future which awaits them is often bleak, with some estimates suggesting that as many as 80 percent of them live from social welfare benefits at a cost of 1.8 billion euros ($2.17) to federal coffers.