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Notes -
Does Germany abolish itself? https://grauwacht.substack.com/p/does-germany-abolish-itself
Schafft Deutschland sich ab? https://grauwacht.substack.com/p/schafft-deutschland-sich-ab
I analyze the latest PISA results to figure out why Germany's performance has declined so much in recent years. My focus is on figuring out the extend to which changes in migration patterns can explain the decline. I won't post the entire post here because it has a lot of figures and will be disjointed to read. Remember to subscribe!
Introduction
In 2010, the book "Deutschland schafft sich ab" (Germany Abolishes Itself) was created by Thilo Sarrazin. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. Sarrazin's core thesis on the topic of education can be roughly summarized as follows:
The German birth rate is low, with less than 1.4 children per woman. This is contrasted by a large number of migrants, especially from Muslim countries, who have higher birth rates.
Many migrants have educational deficits compared to the German population.
Even after several generations, these migrants do not catch up with German society. This is due to genetic and cultural inheritance as well as little pressure to integrate.
In the long run, Germany’s educational achievements will deteriorate due to this demographic change.
Sarrazin's critics argued that he was right about some things, but that he painted too bleak a picture and mixed truths with falsehoods. They pointed out, for example, that there had been progress in the area of education among Turks, a large Muslim immigrant group. Against the background of the recently published PISA study, in which Germany performed miserably, it seems appropriate to re-examine Sarrazin's thesis. In particular, I will use the latest PISA study to answer the question of whether, and to what extent, migration aspects play a role in the continuous decline of German education...
It did not abolish itself, it is occupied and the occupiers will ensure that Germany is kept in line with their ideology. The Germans knew full well what would happen if the Americans and Soviets would take over the world and there is a reason why they fought tooth and nail to stop it. The foresight of German thinkers in the 20s and 30s was astonishing and they understood the direction the anglosphere was taking.
Nonsense. The Soviets never demanded high immigration from their puppets. Likewise, the Americans (at least those from the 1950s) didn't demand high immigration either. The "import third worlders en-masse" agenda is from the woke bug that bit all Western societies in the 2010s. There are no treaties or diktats you can point to where immigration is "forced" on Germany by the US. Maybe there's some bit in there about the EU pushing it, but Germany under Merkel was at the forefront of accepting refugees with the "we can do this" mantra.
It was the Hart-Celler Act of 1965
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965
Mass non-Western immigration in Western Europe begins before 1965. The Empire Windrush docked in London in 1948. The first large wave of non-Western immigration to post-war France is Vietnamese who collaborated with French imperialism moving to France after Vietnamese independence in 1954, with another wave following after Algerian independence in 1962. As discussed below, the largest batch of Turkish Gastarbeiters arrived in Germany in the early 1960's.
Although there is a story about the need for cheap labour, in the British and French cases it looks like an accident rather than a well thought-out policy. The official policy of the 1945 Labour government was to discourage Caribbean immigration, but there was no way of prohibiting what was at the time domestic migration within the British Empire without causing a row that would blow up the whole Empire. The French situation is similar, with most of the early immigrants being what the French government considered to be loyal Frenchmen regardless of their skin colour.
Unlike the US, the 1960's is when the British start to restrict immigration with the 1962 and 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Acts. The UK reopens for mass immigration under Blair in 1997. Something similar happens in France 10 years later, with immigration laws being tightened in 1974 and loosened by Sarkozy.
In other words, the timings don't match up for mass immigration in Western Europe to be an extension of American policy. The wave of immigration permitted by the Hart-Cellar Act coincides with the pause in immigration in Britain and France. If you believe in the cheap labour theory of immigration politics, the explanation for this is easy - the role of cheap migrant labour in the US was filled by blacks moving north to escape Jim Crow.
Immigration began rising earlier in the 1990s under Major, didn’t it? The nadir was in the early ‘80s, but there was still substantial immigration from the third world throughout the 1975-1997 period.
The difference is that it doesn’t show on the now all important ‘net migration’ figures primarily because there was substantial emigration of 200,000+ a year through much of this period, often to Australia and elsewhere, most of which was natives.
There is a long period of negligible net foreign migration in the 70's and early 80's. There appears to be a glacial slow uptrend in both gross immigration and net foreign immigration between about 1985 and 1997, but the data is too noisy to say when it begins. See figures 1.1 and 1.2 (which should, but don't, match) in this old ONS report. The ONS have since stopped publishing immigration statistics from before 2010 because it became clear that the numbers were such poor quality - in particular they are not stock-flow consistent when cross-checked against the census. But you don't need high-quality data to see the increase after 1997, which was deliberate government policy.
I remember that non-refugee immigration was not a political issue during the Major administration - there was a tabloid panic about the number of people claiming refugee status in the immediate post-Cold War period, but the numbers peaked at about 50,000 refugee arrivals per year and about 20,000 asylum grants.
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You write well, thanks for this
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Mass migration started happening in the USA earlier, to be sure, but it was generally seen as a problem. It wasn't until the 2010s that people started pushing for open borders in practice if not in name, and this got transplanted to Europe to cause the chaotic migrations of 2014-2016.
Yeah okay, I'll buy that, open-faced 'the great replacement is a good thing' was about when you're saying
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