Do you speak my language?

Apologies for an extended absence, but this blog author has been applying to grad school (yet again) to pursue a degree in comparative migration policies. As such, I have been thinking about related issues for a number of weeks and thought I would share some of my recent writing. Please find one of my essays below:

More than 82 million people live in Germany , 19% of these have a migrant background (Migrationshintegrund). These figures imply that nearly every fifth banker, teacher, baker, engineer and manager is of immigrant descent. Even a superficial look at the German social landscape reveals that this is not the case. Structural discrimination in-built in the German education system prevents this from happening.

The German government has recently invested an undisclosed amount in an advertising campaign to raise the profile of migrants and their contribution to the German economy. In the speech launching the new initiative, the High Secretary for Integration pointed to US statistics proving that diversified companies far outperformed their peers on the stock market. She also underlined that an EU study had shown that SMEs were losing up to 11% of their export-oriented business, because they failed to bridge linguistic and cultural gaps. Thus, her argument went, migrants in Germany needed to be seen as an asset, their bicultural knowledge and understanding giving the country as a whole the tools it needed to succeed in a globalized world.

But for the 188,000 unemployed migrants between the ages of 18 and 35 in Germany (by far the largest group), the picture is quite different. Recent studies have shown, that many of the unemployed, young migrants fail job interviews because of their German language skills. Nor do most of these youths speak their native languages fluently, and often have only a rudimentary knowledge of their mother tongue's grammar and spelling. Three quarters of the young Turkish immigrant population in Germany were educated in the lowest tiers of the three-tiered German school system, and were not offered additional linguistic coaching as children, a pan-European comparison has recently highlighted. In addition, the OECD's PISA tests revealed that second generation migrant students in Germany had the poorest comparative reading and language skills of all countries surveyed. Almost three times as many migrant children are school dropouts, and 40% receive the lowest possible secondary degree, graduating after nine years of formal education. Only 10% go on to earn a high school degree, while more than a quarter of the Germans do. The country's industry associations have been calling on the government to remedy this situation, as these structural inefficiencies translate into a second generation of “economic deadweight” in the German labor market.

Germany is failing to “make use of the biculturalism of its migrant population” as the minister argued, because the majority of the younger generation does not have the full command of both their native and the German language and is hampered by structural problems in the education system. This, in turn hampers mobility, which is one of the four freedoms of the European Union and a clear advantage of globalization.

A look across the border proves the advantages Germany could reap from introducing enhanced language education: A study examining the Danish situation proved that contrary to public belief, bilingual education helps students integrate quicker into their host country and learn Danish faster. Sweden has proven that the combination of special instruction in the host language coupled with 3-hour language classes in immigrants’ native language from pre-school onward enhances academic performance and later facilitates education and training.

Instead of investing in superficial advertising campaigns and creating business competitions on diversity management that offer cash prizes – as is the case in the government's most recent campaign – it should re-invest these funds into strategic partnerships with businesses, based on already existing formulas toward enhancing early-childhood education in Germany (i.e. the so-called Wissensfabrik). These could finance specialized teacher training for German-as-a-second-language and the introduction of bilingual language training (Turkish and Italian first) into the pre- and primary school curricula.

Businesses have a vested interest in investing in such an initiative: The looming demographic crisis in Germany dictates that the country cannot afford to turn out graduates with insufficient skills. DaimlerBenz, Deutsche Bank and others have issued public statements on the value-added that diversity and bilingualism brings to their companies, from the factory floor to the management level. The advantages of multi-lingual employees and the importance that diversity has in attracting and retaining employees have been proven in a number of EU and OECD studies. These type of initiatives will undoubtedly take time, but they require a first step, a declaration of ownership and commitment to remedying the problem by designating funds, creating local, innovative partnerships toward developing best practice and extending these models across the entire country over time.