Germany's forgotten emigration history complicates modern immigration debate

Germany's immigration debate is dominated by anxiety about outsiders who won't fit in, who cling to their own language and customs, who refuse to become truly German. The irony is sharp and uncomfortable: these exact accusations were leveled at Germans themselves, centuries ago, by someone who helped found the United States.

Benjamin Franklin, in the 18th century, wrote scathingly about German immigrants arriving in America. "Why should they be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours?" he asked. "They will shortly be so numerous and will never adopt our Language or Customs." The words sound like they could have come from today's right-wing populist Alternative for Germany party. Except the people Franklin was condemning were Germans—people fleeing their homeland in search of the happiness and prosperity promised by the American Declaration of Independence, which Franklin himself had helped write.

The early German emigration to America was smaller than the later waves. By 1820, roughly 150,000 Germans had made the crossing. They were often recruited by compatriots who had already settled, men who sent back stories of tremendous success and prosperity—stories that conveniently omitted the fact that these recruiters earned a commission for every person they convinced to leave. The cost of passage on a sailing ship was enormous: about what a skilled tradesman earned in an entire year. Families had to sell everything they owned to afford it. What awaited them on the other side was a nightmare. The voyage took weeks. Below deck, packed into confined spaces, passengers were infested with bedbugs, fleas, and rats. Dysentery, typhoid, smallpox, and scurvy spread rapidly. Gottlieb Mittelberger, a schoolmaster and organist who made the journey in 1750, wrote that "many hundred people necessarily die and perish in such misery, and must be cast into the sea." Those who survived arrival in America often found themselves auctioned off as bonded laborers, their contracts sold to the highest bidder. Families were torn apart. Parents sold their children.

While Germans were sailing west to America, others were moving east. In 1763, Catherine the Great, herself a German princess, issued a manifesto inviting Germans to settle in Russia. She offered free transport, free land, tax exemptions for the first year, schooling, exemption from military service, and the right to maintain their language and largely govern themselves. It was an extraordinarily generous offer, and thousands accepted.

But America remained the primary destination. In the 19th century, Germany's population nearly doubled. The job market collapsed. Failed harvests and famines made survival uncertain. Around 6 million Germans decided they had no future at home and no future for their children. They emigrated to the New World. Between the start of the 19th century and World War I, roughly 60 million Europeans left their homelands altogether, according to migration researcher Jochen Oltmer. Europe was a continent of emigration, not immigration.

That changed after World War II. In the 1950s and 1960s, West Germany experienced an "economic miracle." The country needed workers. Beginning in 1956, trains arrived at stations in Stuttgart, Dortmund, and Cologne carrying Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Portuguese, Yugoslavs, and Turks—people drawn by the promise of well-paid jobs. They were called "guest workers," a term that revealed the official mindset: they were temporary, they would eventually leave, they did not belong. By 1973, when the government banned further recruitment of foreign labor, roughly 14 million people had come to West Germany as guest workers. Around 3 million stayed permanently. Yet Germany still refused to think of itself as an immigration country. "For a very long time, we were dealing with the mindset: It doesn't matter why people came to the Federal Republic; they don't belong, because in any case they'll leave the country again and disappear," Oltmer said.

Today, more than 30 percent of Germany's population has a migrant background, according to the Federal Statistical Office. Yet many third- and fourth-generation citizens still do not feel they belong—a reflection of how society has treated them. Germany now actively recruits skilled workers from abroad. Refugees are granted asylum only if they face political persecution or are fleeing war. Asylum seekers account for barely 10 percent of all immigration to Germany, yet they dominate the public debate. "When it comes to scandalization and the creation of certain negative images, we are seeing a massive distortion of the debate," Oltmer said. The descendants of the Germans whom Benjamin Franklin once scorned as "Palatine boors" have long since integrated perfectly into American society. In Germany, integration is moving far more slowly. Many migrants have no stable legal status, even though everyone knows they will stay. Oltmer believes the country faces an urgent choice: it must sit down and decide what it actually wants German society to look like in the future. "It may be a very hard, even hurtful discussion," he said. "But it's the only way."