ABSTRACT
Like Japan, Germany is an “ethnic citizenship regime” that does not consider itself a “country of immigration.” This is despite the recruitment, entry, and settlement of temporary “guest-workers” and their families; Germany has the second largest number of immigrants in the world, with over seven million foreign born residents living in Germany today (Munz and Weiner 1992: xiii). German immigration and naturalization law, guided by the principle of jus sanguinis, draws a clear line between Germans and foreigners based on membership in the German ethnic community. This concept of ethnic membership serves to effectively restrict “outsiders” who may be living within Germany's borders—guestworkers, asylum seekers, refugees—from inclusion in the political community. Thus, guestworkers and their families, despite having lived in Germany for more than thirty years and having achieved linguistic proficiency to become “sociologically German” (Kajita 1998; Weil 1991), are still considered “foreigners.” However, as in the Japanese case, a different category of ethnically similar and culturally different “outsiders” poses a challenge to traditional ethnic conceptions of membership. The contrast in Germany between ethnic German “newcomers” and Southern European “oldcomers” is an interesting and instructive comparison to the case of nikkeijin “newcomers” to Japan (Kajita 1998: 139). Both cases highlight the relative importance of hypothesized “determinants of immigrant integration” like shared ethnicity, linguistic competence, labor market positioning, and residential segregation. A comparison of the two cases also underscores the impact of immigration and immigrant policy on the integration process. German policy responses to the presence of ethnic German immigrants from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have differed from the Japanese response to the large-scale entry of Latin American nikkeijin. As a result, though the German and Japanese cases are very similar, their outcomes have been quite different. Despite similar starting points, the integration process of ethnic German immigrants in Germany has proceeded in a different manner than that of ethnic Japanese immigrants to Japan.
