Group Discussion on the Novel

Germany as Migration Destination

For many international migrants Germany seems a desirable destination because of its stable economy. In 1994 its GDP per head was more than $25,000 per year; compared to some of Germany's neighbor countries, like Poland, which GDP was $5,336 and the Czech Republic which had a GDP of $7,824 in the same year (U.S. Department of Commerce 835), Germany is a wealthy country and is, therefore, an attractive state to migrate to. In fact, as a survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation reveals, in 2012 Germany has become the second most desirable destination to move to permanently after the USA. Financial crises in the Southern European states led people to leave their home countries and migrate to Germany. Permanent migration rose 38% from 2009 to 2012, and in 2012 400,000 permanent migrants came to Germany. One in three migrants in Europe is moving to Germany now; in 2007 one out of ten moved to the nation. Consequently, Germany is undergoing a migration boom (Webb).

Italian Diaspora in America: Italians as emigrants

Nowadays it is very common to define Italy as a country of immigration whilst in the past it was considered merely such as a country of emigration. During the unification of Italy in 1861, the rise of Fascism and the end of the World War II, there was a phenomenon known as the Italian Diaspora. At the beginning the so called “exodus” regarded only the Northern regions such as Veneto, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Lombardy and Piedmont. Afterwards, the phenomenon interested also the Southern Italian regions such as Calabria, Sicily and Campania. In particular Italians chose to move to America.

Cosmopolitanism: the migrant and the city

"City life is carried on by strangers among strangers" 

Zygmunt Bauman

Graphics on International Migration in Germany

Source:

Spiegel

Rural and Urban Migration in Germany

Migration is usually linked to modernization which is closely connected to industrialization. Therefore, it is often assumed that migration is mostly a process of people moving away from the countryside to an urban environment, as has been described by Ravenstein and Weber among others. The main reason to take part in the process of migration was the poverty that many people in rural and urban areas suffered from. For this reason, people tried to escape poverty and move to areas that were more advanced economically, in hope for a better and wealthier life. In the case of Germany, where industrialization started to grow rapidly around 1850, the assumption that migration in the industrial age is moving away from the rural to the urban space, is not necessarily correct. Migration in Germany has mostly been rural. In fact, while industry was still growing immensely in the the beginning of the twentieth Century, migration declined. The first World War was a major reason for mobility to go down and migration rates proceeded to drop afterwards. For this matter, city registration data from 1924 show that in- and outmigration in urban areas sank from 18% in 1912 to around 9% in 1924-1926 (Hochstadt 453).

Post 9/11 Muslim Immigrants

      History reveals that racism and migration are inextricably intertwined. An outflow of migration is by nature racial as it is a movement in which people move to a country where they are not nationals. In other words, opposition to migrants is opposition to the arrival of foreigners in one’s land. This opposition is usually based on reservations of the locals that the migrants are not credible and that they are not acquainted with the culture and language of the land of arrival.