Many things are more difficult in this day and age, now that migrants can maintain close ties with their homelands via telephone and satellite television.
Nevertheless, a look back can show that new arrivals to Germany have been successfully integrated in the past, and can be successfully integrated again.
From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards we in Germany have taken in hundreds of thousands of people seeking work and their daily bread. They came from the Eastern provinces of the German Reich, from Austria-Hungary, from Russia, amongst them many Poles.
They came to the industrial center that Berlin then was, to the "golden West", to the mines and metalworks of the Ruhr basin. Within one generation villages and small towns were transformed into cities.
The first generation immigrants lived strictly in accordance with the traditions they brought with them, such as Polish-Catholic piety. But the second generation, who worked in the same pits and played in the same football teams, began to pronounce their Polish names in a Germanic, Westphalian way. Just as they were being influenced by their new environment, so they too influenced their new homeland.
How many of us, not just here in Berlin or in the Ruhr area, are descended from immigrants! From fathers and mothers who sought a better life abroad! What reception, what welcome would we have wished upon our grandfathers and great grandfathers?
And how were our fellow countrymen received, when they went abroad?
In its history Germany has not only been at the receiving end of migrations. Poverty and hardship, but also the lure of adventure and the entrepreneurial spirit carried many of our ancestors to Canada and America during the second half of the nineteenth century – year for year in numbers equaling the population of a city.
Germans too were once economic refugees.
Germans too fled political persecution.
Germans too have helped build other nations.
As a consequence of World War II, Germany took in millions of refugees and displaced persons. These people were successfully integrated, but when they first arrived matters were far from easy, even though they were Germans arriving in Germany.
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