Anti-Muslim Views Could Cost German Banker Dearly

(Sept. 4) -- Since the financial crash of 2008, most bankers have sensibly stayed out of the limelight and attempted to avoid controversy. But not Thilo Sarrazin, a director of Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank. His inflammatory new book on the perils of immigration has sparked furious debate in his homeland and almost certainly cost him his $295,000-a-year job.

In "Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab" (which roughly translates as "Germany Does Away With Itself") Sarrazin argues that the right kind of German women are having too few babies, while less-worthy citizens -- Muslims and others with little education -- are having far too many. The result, he claims, is that Germany is getting dumber and its economy being undermined. "With higher relative fertility among the less intelligent, the average intelligence of the population declines," he writes.

Sarrazin, 65, goes on to argue that Germany's national character is being watered down by its 4 million Muslims (that's about 5.5 percent of the population), many of whom, he says, refuse to integrate. "I don't want my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to live in a mostly Muslim country where Turkish and Arabic are widely spoken, women wear headscarves and the day is measured out by the muezzin's call to prayer," he writes. "If I want that experience, I can just take a vacation in the Orient."

Although he has claimed he's no racist, Sarrazin told the Welt am Sonntag paper last Sunday that all Jews "share a particular gene." Stephan Kramer, general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said that Sarrazin should apply for a job as spokesman for race issues in the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party.

Politicians from both the right and left have condemned the senior banker. "I cannot accept [Sarrazin's] accusations," conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel told the Turkish daily Hurriyet. "Entire segments of our population feel insulted by them."

The leadership of the opposition Social Democratic Party, meanwhile, has said it will begin proceedings to revoke Sarrazin's membership. And the board of the Bundesbank on Thursday unanimously voted to dismiss him -- a move that must now be approved by German President Christian Wulff. That should happen fairly swiftly, as the bank made its decision just hours after Wulff warned that Sarrazin's remarks threatened to "damage Germany -- above all internationally."

But despite that high-level criticism, Sarrazin's statements seem to have found favor with a large number of ordinary Germans -- who are, after all, the target audience for his book. A survey for Stern magazine revealed that 46 percent of Germans agree with Sarrazin's claim that they are becoming "strangers in their own country" (51percent disagreed). His tome instantly hit the No. 1 spot on Amazon.de's best-seller list when it was released Monday, and his publisher expects sales to exceed 150,000 copies, The New York Times noted.

The book's success is partly because of growing concerns among some Germans about the parallel society inhabited by immigrants from Muslim countries. Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the country's guest-worker program with Turkey, when Turkish citizens were invited to West Germany to make up for its postwar manpower shortage. The original idea was that those workers would return home, but in the 1970s the West German government allowed their families to move to the country.

Little thought was given to integrating or educating these new arrivals, leaving them with poor career prospects and few incentives to mingle with ordinary Germans. "We invited the guest workers and thought they would leave again soon," Reiner Klingholz, director of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, told German weekly Der Spiegel last year. "For too long we were used to the fact that we have primary school classes where 80 percent of children can't speak German." That's now slowly changing, thanks to a 2005 law that compels new arrivals to master the German language or risk losing their residency permits.

So there is some truth in Sarrazin's claim that a disproportionate number of immigrants have little education -- government statistics show that 9.6 percent of people with an immigrant background, who make up around 18 percent of the population, have no secondary-school diploma, compared with just 1.5 percent of Germans. But that's largely because of the faults of the German state, not -- as Sarrazin argues -- because immigrants inherently lack brainpower.

And in coming years, Germany is going to need more, not fewer, hard-working migrants. The Federal Statistical Office predicts that even with a steady net immigration of up to 200,000 people a year, the German population will fall by 12 million by 2050. That same year, the average age in Germany will hit 60 years old. "Such a society would no longer be capable of playing a role in the global economy," Klingholz wrote in Der Spiegel this week.

Some commentators hope that Sarrazin's loud and clumsy comments will force the government to rethink issues of race and culture -- something it has understandably shied away from since the end of World War II -- and develop integration policies that will ensure that the next wave of desperately needed immigrants aren't treated as outsiders.

"A clever man has got on the wrong track here with his desire to provoke and with his theories about the rapid decline of the German people," noted the centrist Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. "But he has addressed a problem that will remain long after the waves of outrage have subsided: the enormous integration deficit of the Muslim minority in Germany."