Friedrich Merz’s government has sent a clear message to anyone thinking about coming to live in Germany: don’t. Yet its message to those who want to come to Germany to work is: we need you.
This might sound like a contradiction, but it is a revival of the thinking that drove the “guest worker” programme of the postwar boom years. Between 1955 and 1973, West Germany sought to rebuild its economy by attracting labour, mainly from Turkey but also from Italy, Portugal and Yugoslavia. Yet it did so without giving much consideration to the human needs of the people coming.
