Diversity in European regions: Lessons from Germany

Managing cultural diversity has become a central issue for policy-making in the EU. The fact that previously culturally and ethnically homogeneous cities and countries are now home of large, in number and size, enclaves of foreigners from all over the world was unimaginable up to a few decades ago. This large increase in cultural diversity is the result of growing international flows in goods, factors and knowledge that are fostering the global interactions among a rising and increasingly diversified number of people. Managing cultural diversity is not only a goal per se but, as we report in Section 2, it is also a source of economic well-being for individuals: failing in making people live together without prejudice and social struggles would leave them without the possibility of having better economic status during their lifetime. We will therefore try to understand, through case studies on four ethnic groups that reside in Germany, which are the background characteristics that lead people becoming integrated in the socio-economic life of a country. Note that with the word “integrated” we only rely on its positive (i.e. not normative) meaning: we consider integrated a person (or an ethnic group, since we will base our statistics on large numbers) whenever his/her socio-economic characteristics such as income, education, unemployment experiences, etc. are similar to those of natives. The focus of the paper will be, in its first part, on the evolution of diversity in Europe, in particular for the last decade of the past century. Within this period, in regions historically known as emigration ones or generally not touched by large inflows of migrants (such as south of Spain, Italy and Ireland) the trend reversed completely. Today, Spain is one of the most diverse countries of the EU, and large areas in Italy show shares of foreigners above 10%. Together with the evidence on how diversity evolved in Europe, we report evidence about the positive economic effect of diversity for European provinces. In the second part we focus on Germany as an immigration country, looking first at the positioning of the country in terms of migration policy and then at the inflow of foreigners coming from four different countries: Bulgaria, Greece, Italy and Turkey; these groups together represented almost 40% of all immigrants in Germany in 2006. The peculiar differences among these four groups of immigrants will be stressed, in particular the time profile of their inflow to Germany, their characteristics in terms of demography, education and social status and their attitude to naturalise as citizens.