This is a really interesting article from the Washington Post on the influx of immigrants, largely skilled, largely from EU countries where they have the right to relocate without any visa quotas, to Germany.
Not a lot to say about this: Germany has an issue with population decline and is open to immigration but is struggling to get it right. They don’t bean-count racial groups like we do in the US, but they do measure the economic and educational attainment of individuals “from an immigration background” and have a significant problem of Turkish immigrants not assimilating. (See this old post about immigrants and the hauptschule.) A while back I watched a video which complained there was a significant problem with Turkish men bringing women in from Turkey to form polygamous families, though it wasn’t clear to me how they’d work the immigration system to succeed with that.
What is a clear difference between the US and Germany is that the Germans have pushed integration by requiring German language abilities in order for migrants (other than from the EU) to be able to stay. Not just taking a class, as has been proposed in the “Gang of 8” bill, but actual ability within a fixed time after their arrival, or else they are required to leave.
This is my personal experience with this: when our family arrived in Germany for our expat assignment, my husband took care of the paperwork for my work authorization as the spouse of a German citizen, and then we had an appointment to get the authorization finalized, while my in-laws watched the kids. While she completed the forms, the clerk engaged in some, what seemed at the time, small talk with me; it was only later that my husband told me what (he though) was really going on: that she was informally testing my German ability and would have sent me to a class if I hadn’t passed her test.
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