Participants' Reports
Georgetown University, Washington, DC
November 6-9, 2003
Working Group Four: Migration, Integration, and Intercultural Communication
Hosted by the German-American Fulbright Commission
Chair: William M. Chandler
Rapporteur: Peter C. Caldwell
Group Four discussed issues related to migration, integration, and intercultural communication. Sponsored by the Fulbright Commission, the group consisted of over a dozen core members, with eleven separate papers. In almost every panel, the papers presented elicited extensive discussion that ran over the allotted time. So many issues were raised in the discussion that the group decided to ask three separate speakers to hit on the most important topics discussed.
By the end of the first panel, it had become clear that issues of migration imply, in fact, issues related to the totality of society, from demographics, housing, and welfare to social work and labor markets, from problems of assimilation, integration, and citizenship (not identical!) to issues of toleration and intolerance. The group was able to lay out a good many issues—but given the complexity of the matters involved not to reach any clear conclusions.
The purpose of this first report on the working group is to explain the contexts within which the problems of migration, integration, and intercultural communication work. Two contexts framed the discussion.
First, the demographic context: Europeans continue their nearly two century old obsession with a declining birth rate; and the Germans continue to face the question of whether "the Germans are dying out," as Günter Grass put it some thirty years ago. The problems are real: Germany is an aging country (as one paper-giver put it, the New Europe represented by Germany is in fact an Old Europe). And it is an aging country that has offered massive social support for its aging population. Immigration is not merely an issue of cultural norms; it is an issue that affects the German welfare state, since without immigration it is unclear who will actually carry out production, who will provide for the millions of pensions promised by the state. The question is not whether migration should occur—but how.
Second, the context of "globalization." The term covers a wide variety of interconnected phenomena, some new and some not so new. People are able to move long distances more easily, and for less money. And more people from further away—from crisis areas of the entire globe—are moving to places like Germany. The result is a challenge to existing cultures, political and otherwise—with both positive effects and negative. The EU/EC is part of this general process. The result is a far more open set of borders in Europe—which has an effect on labor markets. The nineteenth century "Social Question" begins to reappear in new form. Finally, globalization opens up challenges of movement of human capital. The idea of a "brain drain," according to some of the papers produced, does not adequately describe the full complexity of the movement of people and capital among states. A better description would be the gruesome metaphor of a process of brain transplantation and retransplantation, as ideas and capital flow back to immigrants' homes.
Peter C. Caldwell
Rice University