Unemployment and Attitudes Towards Foreigners in Germany

Germany has a long history of attracting immigrants. This is reflected in the substantial portion of the population accounted for by immigrants. In 1989, foreigners constituted between 7.3% and 7.9% of the population in West Germany. 2 This figure, however, underestimates the inflows of population: In the German statistics, foreigners do not include foreign-born who are ethnic German or foreign-born who have received a German passport. In addition to the inflow of “foreigners,” there has been a large migration of ethnic Germans to West Germany since World War II (before 1950 the inflow was more than 12 million; between 1950 and 1988 it was 4.8 million; and between 1989 and 1990, 0.779 million). Therefore, the number of foreign-bora persons in Germany is comparatively high. 3 This was conscious policy choice. Germany has a “law of return” for “ethnic” Germans and a long history of actively attracting “guestworkers.” 4 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.