Editor’s note: This article is part of a new series on immigration and integration policy around the world. The German Cabinet is set to meet later this month to discuss a draft proposal that would loosen immigration requirements for skilled workers from outside the European Union. The plan in its current form would reportedly abandon a requirement that companies give preference to German citizens before considering foreigners for vacancies, and would also provide qualified foreigners with opportunities to come to Germany to look for jobs. While the proposal enjoys fairly broad support within the governing coalition and its constituencies, it [...]
Yesterday’s anniversary of the 9/11 attacks passed by with relatively muted commemorations. This is understandable given the passage of time, and how we commemorate increasingly distant events. But if the immediate consequences of 9/11 have faded, the less visible aftereffects of that day’s trauma persist. At times, these aftereffects, no less pernicious for being hidden, spring into full view—most recently on Sunday, when Swedish voters made the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats party the third-largest in parliament. It would be relatively easy to trace the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe, of which the Swedish electoral results are but the latest example, [...]
BERLIN — Earlier this summer, the leaders of Bavaria’s conservative Christian Social Union, the sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, threatened to bring down the German government in a showdown with Merkel over stricter measures for refugees and asylum-seekers. The move was largely seen as an attempt by the party, which is facing a challenge from the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to prove it was tough enough on migration issues. It didn’t work out the way they intended. Two months after Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, the head of the CSU, first went head-to-head with Merkel, [...]
