Ruud Koopmans is Research Director at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and Professor of Sociology and Migration Research at Humboldt University Berlin. He is also a member of the German federal government’s Advisory Committee on Islamism.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ruud Koopmans discuss the role of cultural difference in integration, how selective versus non-discretionary migration systems shape integration outcomes, and whether generous welfare states help or hinder immigrant integration.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I am going to start the conversation with an impossibly broad question. European societies were comparatively homogeneous, not as homogeneous as people sometimes claim, and they had all kinds of forms of diversity within them, but they were certainly mostly composed of people who had longstanding origins in Europe and mostly in the geography of those nations seventy or so years ago. There has been significant immigration since then. How has that transformed the European continent, and how is that experience going?
Ruud Koopmans: I have to admit, I thought for a long time that it would not change Europe very much. We in Europe were looking at the experience of classical immigration countries like the United States and Canada, and there it seemed to have worked out well. My assumption was that this would also be the case for Europe.
I must say, in the last fifteen years or so, and especially since October 7, we are seeing that this is actually changing Europe, and not only for the good. There is definitely a good side to increasing diversity, in the sense of a wider palette of culinary choices and more life choice options in general.
There is a dark side, and that dark side has become much more visible recently in the form of jihadist attacks, the growing influence of Islamism and religious fundamentalism, and partly reversals of hard-fought liberal achievements, such as the possibility of being gay and walking hand in hand with your boyfriend through the city, or being Jewish and expressing your religion without fear of being attacked.
In those domains, we have seen partial reversals, especially in larger cities, where the percentage of immigrants has grown to such an extent that people with a migration background are now in the majority.
Mounk: One thing that has struck me, which was relatively obvious when I was young and has only become more obvious since, is that there are similarities between the experience of immigration in North America and Western Europe, but also important dissimilarities. Perhaps the most important of these is that in the United States, if you bet against integration, you almost always lose.
Samuel Huntington is a political scientist I greatly admire who made many contributions to the study of political science before his famous book on the clash of civilizations and before his last and most controversial books about Latino immigrants. He was wrong in that last book in particular in which he argued that Latino immigration to the United States would fundamentally transform the country, that English would no longer be the dominant language, and that Latinos had completely different values.
When you look at the trajectory of Latino communities in the United States, particularly second- and third-generation Latinos, they are fully integrated into American life. Many of the fears Huntington expressed have not materialized. When you look at someone who was born and raised in the United States, it is very rare for them to appear as anything other than straightforwardly American, to feel that way, and to be treated that way.
It is striking that in Europe, in many countries, this is not the case. People who were born and raised in Germany, the Netherlands, France, or the United Kingdom, sometimes even people whose parents or grandparents arrived there decades ago, still feel, and are often treated as, not truly members of society in the same way.
What explains that? Is it the different historical origin point, that American societies are immigration societies where the vast majority of the population has a background of migration? Is it institutions today that make integration harder in Germany than in the United States? Is it cultural attitudes, or exclusionary attitudes on the part of the majority? If you agree with the basic diagnosis, what explains it? If you do not agree, what did I get wrong?
Koopmans: I agree with your diagnosis that integration is much more difficult in the European context than in North America. Huntington was not the only one who was mistaken about Latino immigrants. There is a famous article by Aristide Zolberg of the New School for Social Research in New York with the title Islam Is Like Spanish.
The comparison is that the problem of integrating Spanish-language immigrants in the United States would be the same as integrating Muslim immigrants in the European context. I think that comparison is mistaken on many counts. First, on the simple grounds that languages can be combined. You do not have to give up Spanish in order to learn English, but you cannot be Muslim and non-Muslim at the same time. Religion is a much more exclusive identity, and it is also a much more sticky identity.
Mounk: One of the striking findings about language in the United States, if I remember rightly, and you’re better up on this literature, is that people who immigrate to the United States often do not learn very good English. If they come as adults and are not very highly educated, they often struggle to be fluent in English for the rest of their lives.
Just the other day in Brooklyn, I saw a small construction site outside my house. A guy driving a truck was being spoken to in English and he could not respond. He basically did not speak a word of English, and they had to find somebody who spoke Spanish to talk to him.
The children of immigrants are usually bilingual. They usually speak both languages very well, and they usually prefer to speak English with their peers. Even though they are quite fluent in the heritage language, by the third generation there is only about one percent of people who still speak the language of origin in the United States. Only about one percent of third-generation Latinos have any real command of Spanish, which is a shame, but it tells you how easily that transition happens.
Koopmans: That is the same in the European context. There is really no difference there. It goes to show that language is a dimension of cultural difference that is very easy to integrate, also because you do not need to assimilate it. Even in cases where people do not learn the language of the country of immigration, they basically only hurt themselves. They hurt their chances for social mobility by not speaking English or not speaking German in the German context, but it does not bother anybody else because there is no value conflict tied to language.
That makes religion fundamentally different. You see that as well when you look at norms and values. The World Values Survey has mapped cultural values across the world, and it is very visible there. If we look at Latin America, the cultural distance between Latin America and the United States, or between Latin America and Europe, is relatively small. It is about as large as the cultural distance between Eastern and Western Europe, or between Catholic and Protestant countries in Europe. These are not identical cultures, but they are relatively similar.
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The large cultural differences are between Western Europe, North America, Australia, and Sub-Saharan Africa and the Muslim world. That is where the big cultural differences lie. That makes integrating people who come from countries with a larger cultural distance more difficult. There is also a major difference in the composition of the immigrant population in the United States or Canada compared to Europe.
In Europe, Muslim immigrants make up a very large share of the immigrant population, whereas they are a much smaller segment of the immigrant population in Australia, Canada, and the United States.
Mounk: Tell us a little bit about those cultural differences. I want to get to the second point, but first tell us a little bit about them, especially for people who might be more skeptical about cultural arguments in general. In parts of the debate, saying that some immigrants are more culturally proximate to the majority population than others is itself seen as a word that many people dislike, often described as problematic.
When you are looking at something like the World Values Survey and finding those kinds of differences, and saying that Latin American countries are relatively more similar to North America and Western Europe in terms of cultural attitudes than other populations, what kind of questions is this based on? How reliable are these analyses? Tell us a little bit about why we should have confidence in that statement.
Koopmans: These cultural differences show themselves, for instance, in attitudes on gender relations, the relations between men and women, whether women should be subordinate to men. A typical question would be whether a university education is more important for boys than for girls.
They also appear in attitudes toward homosexuality, toward divorce, and toward authority relationships within the family. Another typical question is whether the most important thing for a child is not to disappoint their parents, or whether children should be obedient to their parents. These are the kinds of values being measured.
Mounk: To what extent is this a question about a stage of economic development as opposed to different cultural regions? I grew up in Germany, you can go back to cultural attitudes about gender in Germany forty or fifty years ago and see that they were much more conservative than they are today.
My mom was a single mom who was a musician and a conductor, and it was very difficult for her to find ways to make sure that people were looking after me because the idea of a German kindergarten in the 1980s, even in big cities like Munich, was that it would open from ten to twelve in the morning and from three to five in the afternoon. That was supposed to allow the mother, who was presumably a housewife, to go shopping without her kid crying and perhaps have a coffee with a friend.
The idea of a working mother was still somewhat culturally suspect. You are talking in part about the Muslim world here, and that may be right, but Iran, which is a comparatively developed country within the Muslim world, has, I believe, more women in university today than men. Clearly, some things do change. Is this a difference you see even at the same or comparable levels of economic development, or is this simply a question of what economic stage a country is at?
Koopmans: It is both. There is clearly a relationship between levels of socioeconomic development and these kinds of values. But even at the same level of modernization or socioeconomic development, there are differences. Countries of the Arabian Peninsula, for instance, are extremely rich, but they still hold very conservative values. Turkey is at a level of economic development that is not below, and probably above, several Latin American countries, yet the value distance to Turkey is larger than the value distance to Latin America. So it is a combination of both factors.
The same applies to countries in South and East Asia. These countries are not socioeconomically richer than many countries in the Muslim world, yet they hold values that are closer to those of Western Europe and North America. One important aspect here is the role of religion in society, such as whether religious rules should form the basis of social organization or whether religious leaders should play an important role in politics. These are typical questions in these surveys. Southeast and East Asian countries tend to be relatively close to Western countries on these dimensions, whereas countries in the Muslim world and Sub-Saharan Africa tend to be at a greater cultural distance.
When I refer to Sub-Saharan Africa, I am also talking about countries that are majority Christian. This is not exclusively a Muslim phenomenon. There is also a very traditional and orthodox form of Christianity that is especially prevalent in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Mounk: Values were the first explanation you were giving and then I cut you off to dive into that in more detail, but you had other things on your list.
Koopmans: The second factor is whether migration has happened primarily selectively, on the conditions set by the country of immigration, which has a points system, a visa system, or a lottery system, as the United States partly has, where you set certain criteria and certain numbers of immigrants that you allow in on a yearly basis, or whether immigration happens spontaneously, basically non-discretionary migration, as it is called in the scientific literature, where the receiving country does not have the possibility to say no.
That is the case, on the one hand, for refugee and asylum migration, where there is international law that says that somebody who wants to claim asylum has a right of entry and a right to an asylum procedure, and also the right to protection against expulsion, which de facto means that most people who come in as asylum seekers, regardless of whether they are accepted or rejected, can stay in the end.
The second important part of non-discretionary migration is family migration, where again we have universal human rights that make it very difficult to limit family migration. If you then compare Western Europe to the classical immigration countries, you see that the vast majority of immigration to a country like the United States, and even more so with Canada and Australia, is discretionary. It happens on the conditions and criteria set by the country of immigration. By contrast, the vast majority of migration to Europe is non-discretionary. It consists of asylum migration and family migration.
The consequences of this are very visible. If you look at the Turkish population in the United States, it has a higher level of education than the average American. If you look at the Turkish population in Germany or Austria, it has a much lower level of education. The same is true for Nigerians. Nigerians are highly educated and a very successful group in the United States, but in Europe they are a group you find at the bottom of the ladder.
That is because they often come in as irregular immigrants, they claim asylum, they usually do not get asylum because there is very little political persecution in Nigeria, and they are basically economic migrants. They can nonetheless stay, and they are very often unemployed.
Mounk: When you look at the success of particular immigrant groups in the United States, the reason is often that they were predominantly H-1B migrants. Now, of course, often it is the children and grandchildren of H-1B migrants. That applies to Indian Americans, Nigerian Americans, Pakistani Americans, many of whom have ancestors who originally entered the United States in the 1970s when there was a shortage of doctors, for example, on H-1B visas.
They then had children who also tended to be successful. Often they were able to bring in other family members later through family migration. On the whole, the sibling of a doctor is also likely to come from a relatively high social class with relatively high levels of education. These are extremely successful immigrant groups.
I think you are right that when you look at the countries that have been most successful at integrating immigrants, it tends to be Australia and Canada. What those two places have in common is that they have historically been able to select migrants. Australia is an island that is far away, and Canada, while it has a very large border with the United States, does not have a large border with poorer countries in its region. People who reach the United States generally remain there.
To what extent do you think this first point and the second point are in conflict with each other? When you look at Canada, it has invited many people from cultures that you say are less proximate to Canada. Canada has a substantial number of immigrants from the Muslim world and a significant number from Sub-Saharan Africa. Because these migrants are highly selected, with something like two thirds of immigrants having at least a college degree, this tends to work very well.
As long as you are selecting on those criteria, does the degree of cultural fit matter much less, or do you think it remains important even when you use a selective point system like the ones in Canada and Australia?
Koopmans: It is hard to say because it is not true that Canada has a similar-size Muslim population as European countries. In the European context, we are talking about anywhere between six and ten percent of the population right now that is Muslim. That includes people from Muslim countries who are not Muslim or who are no longer Muslim. That is a sizable and rapidly growing part of the population. In the United States, Canada, and Australia, we are talking about two to three percent. So we are talking about a magnitude that is two to three times smaller than in Europe.
This is combined with the fact that the highly educated parts of the populations of these Muslim countries tend to be less strongly religious and more secular oriented. I know Turkey quite well because my wife is from Turkey. The Turkish immigrants in the United States, and my brother-in-law is one of them, come from a substratum of Turkish society that is very secular. Some of them may call themselves Muslim in name, but they definitely do not adhere to more orthodox or fundamentalist forms of religiosity.
What I mean to say is that this migration of highly educated elites from these countries is not just selective in the sense that these are more highly educated people who integrate more easily in a socioeconomic sense, but also selective in the sense that they are culturally much more proximate. The global culture of the highly educated elite is very similar across countries around the world.
Mounk: Okay, so we’ve talked about culture, we’ve talked about selectivity. What about other factors? Does the generosity of a welfare state play a role, for example?
Koopmans: That was precisely the third factor that I wanted to mention. That also makes a big difference. In Europe, at least in northwestern Europe, we have relatively developed welfare states, even though there have of course been cutbacks since the 1990s. They are not as extensive as they used to be, but still the level of social welfare provision is much higher in northwestern Europe than it is in the United States, and even higher than in Canada or Australia.
I am not just talking about unemployment benefits or social welfare payments, but also the education system and the health system. That is a major factor. Health care in most European countries is very egalitarian in the sense that you do not need private insurance to get good health care. It does not cost much money, or it does not cost any money, to get a good education for your children. If you do not have the money to pay for it yourself, the state provides scholarships.
These welfare states offer a lot. At the same time, they are financed by a relatively high level of taxation compared to North America. That has two consequences for migration flows. On the one hand, it makes Europe a very attractive destination for people with low human capital and lower levels of education, who do not necessarily have the skill sets to be successful in the labor market of a developed country. I am not saying that people migrate in order to become dependent on social welfare, but they know that even if they do not find a job, they will still be able to live a relatively decent life, get a good education for their children, and enjoy a good level of health care.
At the same time, it makes Europe less attractive for those with very high levels of skill and education that are sought after in the labor market. Take the proverbial Indian computer engineer. If this person looks at the different global options for migrating to Europe or to the United States, the income, and certainly the net income after taxes and social security payments, that they can earn in the United States is much higher than in Europe. Europe is therefore more attractive to migrants who are more difficult to integrate into the labor market and less attractive to highly skilled migrants. That is something Europe is realizing at its own expense right now. It is very difficult for Europe to compete globally for highly educated, skilled migrants.
Mounk: There was a story in Germany a good number of years ago when the Social Democrat-Green government wanted to give out visas to attract global talent. They talked a lot at the time about Indian IT engineers they wanted to attract. Because it was hard to get that through in Germany, there was a lot of resistance. They ended up with quite onerous restrictions on that visa.
It turned out that all of the people who were able to meet the conditions for that visa could also meet the conditions to go to the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, or Australia, and very few of them ended up coming to Germany. The quota for that kind of visa was relatively low and was not filled, if I am remembering correctly. So you are right about that.
Going back to the idea of the welfare state, I have been thinking a lot about how some of the assumptions I had about the world when I was growing up and going to university were shaped by what my professors and smart newspapers gave me. One assumption was that a more generous welfare state would be better for the integration of immigrants. If it is easier to access a good education irrespective of how much money your parents have, that will make it easier for people who come to a country without means to discover their talents, develop their skills, and integrate into the job market.
If the state comes when you arrive and says we are going to find a language course for you, that will help you learn the language of the country you are in. That presumably facilitates integration. Having better health coverage means you are not excluded from full participation in social life because you have a curable disease and are instead able to participate fully.
You have argued, I believe, that this is not the case. That in many ways the lack of welfare provision, particularly for undocumented migrants in the United States, forces people into the labor market immediately. That actually means they are more likely to learn the language, more likely to pick up skills, more likely to become culturally conversant in their new society. And that the relatively generous welfare states of certain European countries are part of what has led to a lot of social isolation among immigrant communities.
Tell us why the instinct that I had as an eighteen-year-old, which I think many people still have, and perhaps some listeners of this podcast still have, has turned out, according to you, to be wrong.
Koopmans: Yeah, the instinct that you had, or maybe still have, is also the instinct that I had, and it is the instinct that was behind the relatively lenient and laissez-faire integration policies that Europe originally had. What people did not realize, and what I did not realize initially, is that the welfare state changes the incentive structure for immigrants, especially if immigrants are not highly educated, have a high risk of becoming dependent on welfare benefits, and come from countries with a very low level of welfare, where people are not used to very high aspiration standards.
If we look at the immigration that has taken place to Europe since 2011–12, since the start of the civil war in Syria and the revolts and civil wars of the Arab Spring in other countries, these were to a large extent people with a very low level of education. Especially the women among them often had no education whatsoever or were illiterate to a considerable extent, and they came from conservative cultures where participation of women in the labor market is not a social norm, or where it is a social norm for women to stay at home. Syria, for instance, was, pre–civil war, the country with the second-lowest labor market participation of women in the world after Yemen.
If these people came to the United States, with a very low level of welfare provision, it would be natural for them to do everything they can to be successful in the labor market, to get a job, and to earn the money they need to afford education for their children. In the European context, what we see happening is that a very large share of these refugees who came in over the last ten to fifteen years are still dependent on social welfare benefits. Because of their low level of education, women often work in jobs where they do not earn enough money, according to welfare standards in a country like Germany, to afford a decent living, so they receive additional welfare payments. With every child they have, they receive more welfare payments. You can receive thousands of dollars a month in welfare payments if you have a family with a couple of children. That can quickly add up to more than a single person with a low level of education can earn in the labor market.
The incentive structure is such that it often does not make sense to look for work, and it definitely does not make sense for women to take up a job if that goes against cultural norms. As a theoretical story, both of these scenarios make sense, but if you look at the actual data, it is the second one, the one about the incentive structures of the welfare state, that is the predominant outcome. More than half of the people on welfare benefits in Germany and in the Netherlands are either first- or second-generation immigrants.
Mounk: I am very struck by a comparison that is somewhat surprising, which is that of Soviet Jews. A lot of Soviet Jews left in the late 1980s and early 1990s, both because of significant levels of antisemitism at the time and because of the general chaos of the Russian economy after the fall of communism. A number of them ended up in Germany and a number ended up in the United States. These things are never completely random, but they were relatively comparable populations.
In particular, the populations had a clear majority of people with not just college degrees, but postgraduate degrees. It was a very highly educated population from urban centers who had held relatively good jobs in the Soviet economy. If I remember this correctly from a study I saw many years ago, about three percent of Soviet Jews who ended up in the United States experienced long-term unemployment, a very small number. Something like sixty percent of Soviet Jews who ended up in Germany experienced long-term unemployment.
The reason for this was not just incentives, where a more generous welfare state made it easier for someone who was perhaps fifty years old at the time of migration to say that integrating into a new society and finding a new job was really difficult, and that they might instead remain on welfare until retirement. It was also barriers to entry. If you were a professor in the Soviet Union, you could probably become a teacher in the United States relatively easily. It might take a year to learn the language well enough and a year to obtain some kind of teaching certification, and then you could work in education.
In Germany, by contrast, you would have had to return to the first semester of university and complete five or seven years of study in order to qualify. The children of those immigrants were very successful in the United States and very successful in Germany as well, because a lot of that educational and social capital traveled across generations. They were young enough to go to German schools, understand how the system worked, and perform very well. But the contrast between the two older generations was striking. The older generation struggled much more in the European context.
What does that mean? If you were to design a welfare system from scratch, which elements actually help integration and which elements harm integration? Presumably, helping people access language lessons should be a good thing. The state saying, here is a way to spend two or three months in a language school learning the language of your host country, seems helpful. Having basic access to health care also seems positive for integration outcomes.
But perhaps I am wrong about that. Which elements do you think actually facilitate integration, and where do you start to see a real trade-off between the benefits given to poor and vulnerable people and the counterproductive effects those benefits can have on successful integration into society?
Koopmans: I think we are going through an interesting social experiment in Europe now with the migration of Ukrainians. The approach Germany has chosen is quite different from that of some other European countries, for instance the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, the idea is that you should get a job as soon as you can.
In Germany, the idea is that you should first learn the language. The state pays for the language course, and during the time of the language course you do not have to take up work. You have a right to social welfare. What we are seeing now is that the level of labor market participation of Ukrainians in Germany, even after a few years, is much lower than it is in the Netherlands and in most other European countries.
Of course, the jobs that Ukrainians, mostly Ukrainian women, then have in countries such as the Netherlands are not necessarily jobs at their level of qualification, because they do not yet know the language and may not have precisely the same educational credentials that are required, although Ukraine is relatively close to Western Europe in terms of educational standards, so that does not play a very large role.
The question is whether, in the very long run, the German strategy might pay off if you view this as a form of permanent migration. But if you look at it from the point of view that this is a refugee population, and that hopefully many of these Ukrainians can soon go back to their country, then it is actually better to make them work and be part of society. In doing so, they also learn the language, make friends, and establish social contacts.
What happens in the German context is that people often spend a very long time in these language courses, which turn out not to be very efficient at actually teaching the language. There are no sanctions for not completing the course or not completing it at a sufficiently high level. If the incentive is not there that, after completing the language course, you will be able to earn more money in a job than you already receive in social benefits for yourself and your children, then the problem of the incentive structure remains.
It even becomes a disincentive to do your best in the language course, or to attend at all. These courses in Germany are free, and yet they still have problems with attendance. There is now a discussion about whether people should be sanctioned for not attending the free language course, which is ridiculous.
Mounk: Having learned a number of languages in my life, a well-taught language course can be helpful, particularly if the students in the course are all from different backgrounds, so that you have to use the local language as the lingua franca among you. But when it is not well taught, it does not help very much, even for someone who is very motivated to learn. When all of the students in the class share the same language, then probably the moment the formal lesson is over, they talk to each other in their native tongue, which is natural.
I have found that what is much more helpful for learning a language is being in situations where you have to use it because you are communicating with a friend, a boss, a coworker, someone in a service profession, or the conductor of a bus or a tram from whom you have to buy a ticket. Even just for language learning, being thrown into a job may be a more efficient way of teaching many people than sitting in a classroom like that.
What about the other question that always comes up, for good reason, when comparing the integration of Ukrainians into those societies with that of other groups? One difference is that because Ukrainian men are not allowed to leave the country for obvious military reasons, the influx of Ukrainians has mostly been women and children, whereas because of the structure of the asylum system, most asylum seekers who arrive in Europe are young men.
There is also a cultural difference here. To what extent is the receiving society more open to Ukrainians than it might be to people who come from Syria or Nigeria? More broadly, what is the role of discrimination in some of these labor-market outcomes? There is a well-established research program in sociology where CVs are sent to employers with different names, identical experience, identical grades, identical qualifications, but one name indicates someone likely born and raised in Germany, while another indicates roots in Turkey, Syria, Nigeria, or elsewhere.
It tends to be the case that people with German-sounding names receive more invitations to job interviews. Do you buy that literature? How large is that effect? How much of the difference in integration and labor-market outcomes does that actually explain?
Koopmans: You asked two different questions. The first question was the more specific one about the different perceptions and treatment of Ukrainians versus other migrants. The second question was a more general one about discrimination. Let me answer the first question first. It is shifting a little bit now as the war in Ukraine takes longer, but still, the perception and the willingness to make sacrifices for Ukrainian immigrants is definitely larger than for immigrants from Western Africa or the Middle East.
There is a good reason for that. Ukrainians are fleeing into the European Union directly from a war zone. When the war started in Ukraine, it was very clear. Russian forces were advancing, bombs were falling on Ukrainian cities, and Ukrainians were fleeing en masse over the Polish border and then on to Germany. It was obvious that these were people directly fleeing armed aggression and that Europe was the first place that could come to their aid.
That is a different situation from what we face with people from Afghanistan or Syria, where people come to Europe not directly from the war zone, but via at least one, and in many cases several, countries where they had already found refuge from political persecution or war. Syrians who came to Europe in large numbers in 2015 had, to a large extent, already been in Turkey for years. That is not the same situation as that of the Ukrainians. Closing the borders to Ukrainians at that moment would have been comparable to closing the doors, which Europe actually did, to Jews in the 1930s. So it is a different situation.
Now to the more general question about discrimination and whether I buy that literature. I am actually part of that literature. I have done that kind of research myself, and I was part of the first cross-nationally comparative study of labor market discrimination. There are two interesting results from that literature from a cross-national perspective. If I were to ask you whether you think the level of labor market discrimination is higher in Germany or in the United States, what would you answer?
Mounk: Well, I would have answered Germany, which makes me think that the true answer is the United States.
Koopmans: It’s true. Within Europe, we did a five-country study. The countries we included were Norway, Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Germany. The United Kingdom was the country with the highest level of labor market discrimination.
Mounk: This is relevant because those are the countries that actually have done comparatively better at integrating immigrants than Germany.
Koopmans: They supposedly are the ones that are more inclusive, and Germany always has the bad image of this being an ethnic nation, et cetera. But it turns out that of those countries, the lowest level of labor market discrimination was in Spain, and second was Germany. It is not just our study that shows that. Ours was unique in the sense that we had exactly the same design and the same immigrant groups that we could compare across five countries.
There have also been previous meta-studies that bring together the results of various national-level labor market discrimination studies. They showed the same thing: very high levels of discrimination in the United States, very high levels of discrimination in the United Kingdom, moderate levels in countries such as the Netherlands or Sweden, also countries that traditionally have had a relatively multicultural, inclusive integration policy, and the lowest levels in countries like Germany and Austria. So the ideas, the cliché images that people have about discrimination, are often not accurate.
If you then look at our study for Germany, for instance, there is also no significant discrimination against all immigrant groups. There are many immigrant groups that do not suffer significant discrimination or any discrimination at all. That is true for immigrants who come from other European countries. It is also true for immigrants who come from East Asian countries or from Latin America, at least in the European context.
It is not true for immigrants who come from Muslim-majority countries. It is also not true for immigrants who have a Black facial phenotype. So there is discrimination against Muslims, and there is discrimination against Black people in the European context.
Mounk: In Europe, you often include pictures of yourself in applications, right?
Koopmans: Well, not in all countries, but in the German context it is possible, and also in the Netherlands it is possible. In those countries, we did find that a Black phenotype led to discrimination, not to very high levels of discrimination, I should also say.
Mounk: I was going to ask what is the magnitude of this effect? Does this mean that you have to send six CVs rather than five CVs in order to get one callback for an interview? Or does it mean that you have to send 20 CVs rather than one CV in order to get a callback for an interview? How big of an actual difference does that make in terms of your likely rate of success?
Koopmans: A relatively small difference in the context of Germany, where we are talking about, I think we had in our study eight different professions, and we had overall invitation rates of about 52% or so. Among these discriminated groups, blacks and Muslims, we were talking about 45%. So it is lower, but still there was a fairly high chance to be invited, even if you had an application letter which indicated that you were Muslim or a photo that indicated that you were black.
Mounk: Is there any change over time in this? Has this effect gone up or down over time as far as we know, or is the literature not clear on that?
Koopmans: The studies that I know for Germany show that it is relatively constant. It has never been very large in Germany. We have several studies going further back in the past about discrimination against Turks, and that has always been relatively consistent. It is there. It is definitely significant. Therefore, it is unacceptable. To not invite people for a job interview just because of their background, race, or religion is not a good thing.
It is not something that contributes in a very major way to the chances of success on the labor market of immigration, at least in continental European countries. I am not sure about the UK, and I am also not sure about the United States. It may well be that it is much more significant there, but in the European context, it is different.
If you look at surveys, the other way to study labor market discrimination is to look at the so-called ethnic penalty. You look at levels of employment and try to explain them with level of education, age, gender, and other factors that we know generally contribute to labor market success. Usually, there is a difference that remains between ethnic groups, which is often referred to as the ethnic penalty.
In a study that I did, I looked in addition at cultural factors. I looked at self-reported language knowledge. I looked at the amount of inter-ethnic social contacts that people reported, whether their circle of friends and family consisted only of people from their own ethnic group or also of people from the country of immigration. I also looked at values about the participation of women in social life, including on the labor market.
If you include these cultural factors, you can actually explain away the remaining difference between majority ethnicities and, in this case, four different Muslim immigrant groups. Education, social capital, demography, and cultural differences explain the gap in labor market participation. We additionally asked people about their discrimination experiences and found that it had no explanatory value for their labor market outcomes.
Mounk: So how likely people are to say that they have been discriminated against does not correlate with success in the labor market.
Since you mentioned Turkish immigrants to Germany, for a little bit of context, the German government in the 1960s, when there was a need for a lot of unskilled labor in German factories, made a contract with the Turkish government and basically invited a lot of people from Turkey into the country. A lot of the time this was people from poorer regions of Turkey. Often it was people who were not in employment at the time. They were meant to be guest workers, which is the German term for this, Gastarbeiter, who would stay for a number of years and then go back. Of course, by and large, they ended up staying in Germany, or at least a certain portion ended up staying in Germany and then bringing family members with them.
Today, Turkish immigrants to Germany are, I assume, the biggest immigrant group in Germany and remain so. They were certainly the most visible immigrant group when I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, when we talked about immigration to Germany and integration and successes and failures. Really, you were talking about Turks in Germany by and large.
You go to the year 2010, and a man by the name of Thilo Sarrazin writes a book that is a huge bestseller, a rather dry read, called Deutschland schafft sich ab, in which he claims that this Turkish minority in particular really has not integrated very well and has very bad labor market outcomes. He made some very controversial claims about the average IQ of Turkish immigrants being lower than that of other groups. This was really the center of the debate. There was a giant debate about this book. It is hard for me to think of an Anglophone equivalent. Perhaps some of the furor around Jordan Peterson comes close, but it was really larger in magnitude.
In 2015, you have the beginning of a refugee crisis. Angela Merkel says her famous “Wir schaffen das.” (“We can do this.”) You have very high levels of people coming into Germany and other European countries from Syria and Afghanistan, as well as sub-Saharan Africa.
What I find interesting is that in the decade since then, two things have happened. The first is that the political consensus around asylum policy has really shifted. I want to get back to that in a moment. In 2015, even the rightmost party in the Bundestag at the time, the Christian Democrats, were saying that Germany needed to welcome people to the country and had effectively an open border policy, at least in rhetoric.
Today, it is nearly the inverse. Virtually every political party in Europe says that something like 2015 should not be repeated, even if they sometimes do not quite admit the extent to which they have changed their minds over the past ten years.
The second thing that has happened is that Turks have really fallen out of the debate over migration in Germany. Today, when you talk about integration and challenges of integration, it is really about people who came to the country from Syria, from Afghanistan, and to a lesser extent from sub-Saharan African countries. The question of the integration of what remains the largest immigrant group in Germany, and certainly the one that was of longer standing and at the very center of public attention until about fifteen years ago, does not exist anymore in public debate.
I want to go back to that and ask how this Turkish minority group in Germany is doing. Have they integrated over time? Is the news more positive over the long run than it may seem over the short run? In a certain paradoxical way, the latest wave of immigration may have helped Turkish Germans to be seen as the comparatively better immigrants, more longstanding, more likely to be integrated, more likely to speak German perfectly, because they are now second-, third-, fourth-, and fifth-generation Germans.
What is happening to that strand of the story that has been dropped from public salience in a quite remarkable way over the last ten years?
Koopmans: Yeah, there is always such a thing as an ethnic hierarchy. Prior to the refugee crisis of 2015, Turks were at the bottom of the perceived hierarchy and to some extent also objectively. Still, as an immigrant group, four decades after the end of the guest worker period, they were indeed still doing quite badly in terms of welfare dependence and in terms of school success of children of the second and third generation.
It is definitely the case that nowadays people do not talk much about the Turks anymore. That is partly because there is increasing integration as the generations replace each other. The third generation is doing a little bit better than the second, and the second was doing better than the first. So objectively there has been some improvement, but the major development is that since then about three million people, not counting the Ukrainians, and also non-Ukrainian refugees, have come to Germany.
These groups are doing much worse than the Turks in terms of labour market participation. That is something new compared to Turkish migration: these new immigrant groups are also very strongly overrepresented in crime statistics.
We have also seen the problem of jihadi violence, which is something that has never occurred to any significant extent among Turks. Even though Turks are by far the largest Muslim group in Germany, there have been very few attempted or successful Islamist attacks where the perpetrators were of Turkish origin.
Most of the attacks that have happened, not just in Germany but also in other European countries, have been committed by people who came in as refugees since 2010. These are people from Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and to some extent also from the Maghreb countries. Tunisia is one example, as the perpetrator of the attack on the Christmas market in Berlin was Tunisian, and Morocco is another.
This has brought these more recent immigrant groups much more to the forefront of the political debate. It has also improved the relative standing of Turks, who were previously seen as a not very successful immigrant group. Many Germans now long for the days when they had to deal with the problems of Turkish immigration, which in hindsight were not nearly as bad as people thought at the time.
Mounk: So in terms of relative standing, I think that is clearly the story and it is relatively straightforward. What about in terms of absolute standing? When you look at the population of people of Turkish origin in Germany today, how integrated are they? How well are they doing? Are most of them now firmly in the German middle class after roughly 60 years of immigration from Turkey to Germany? Can we have a more positive overall assessment of this than we might have had 20 years ago, or how would you say, irrespective of the comparison to more newly arrived groups, is it a positive image, a mixed image, or a worrying image?
Koopmans: I think it is a mixed image in several senses. First of all, it is very difficult to generalize about such a large group. There is a subset of the population of Turkish origin that is very successful. Some of the most important entrepreneurs in Germany are of Turkish origin.
Mounk: Famously the founders of one of the companies that produced the COVID vaccines.
Koopmans: Of course, in the culture sector and in sports, there are many examples of extremely successful integration. But the majority of people of Turkish origin, also in the second and third generation, are still working class and definitely not part of the middle class.
They are still very much overrepresented in the statistics on welfare dependence, and their children are still doing comparatively badly in school. So it is not an overall success story. It is mixed to that extent. Secondly, there has been progress on the socioeconomic front. Educational success is definitely better than it was 20 years ago.
The labour market position is also definitely better than it was 20 years ago. But politically and culturally, the development has partly been in the other direction. That is a result of developments in Turkey itself. The Turkey of 20 years ago is not the same as the Turkey of today. The Turkey of today has been ruled for several decades by an Islamist party and now an Islamist dictator, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has changed Turkey, and not for the better. I mean, economically maybe for the better, but in a political and social-cultural sense, definitely not.
Through the influence that Turkey has on the Turkish population living in Germany through mosques and through media, that has also had its effects on the population of Turkish origin in Western Europe. If you look at recent years, Turks abroad, the diaspora, also have the right to vote in parliamentary and presidential elections in Turkey. The vote for the AKP party, the Islamist party of Erdogan, is higher among people of Turkish origin living in Western Europe than it is in Turkey proper.
That is part of the story of Turkish integration that has not gone in a positive direction, because that was actually better and also perceived better in the pre-Erdogan times, when Turkey was proud of its secular heritage and stood firmly in the tradition of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, separation of church and state, etc. Culturally, I would say Turkish immigration is viewed to some extent as more problematic, and rightly so, than it was 20 years ago.
Mounk: We mentioned the asylum system a few times, but we have not properly talked about it. It is something you write about in a recent book. I am really struck by the extent to which there is a kind of defensiveness about the asylum system on the broad left-of-center space, where people want to defend it as something that is moral in the way it is working at the moment.
It strikes me that it really is not moral. At the moment, we are basically saying that the vast majority of people who are in desperate need of help around the world are not going to get any assistance from Europe. But if you happen to be young enough that you are willing to risk a very dangerous journey across the Mediterranean, and if you are comparatively affluent or able to draw on comparatively high resources in order to pay smugglers, I do not know what the going rate is, maybe ten thousand U.S. dollars, to help you make that journey and get across the Mediterranean, then once you make contact with us on the territory of Europe, we are going to, in certain ways, be reasonably generous.
We will put you up in relatively nice housing and give you an allowance that allows you to live without your own effort in ways that certainly are not luxurious, but are probably more generous than the situation from which, for very understandable reasons, you are fleeing. On the other hand, we will really not allow you to integrate into society properly. Most likely, certainly in most European countries, you are not going to be allowed to work.
Koopmans: That’s not true. That used to be the case in the relatively distant past, but that has not been the case for at least 10 to 15 years.
Mounk: Okay, I remember when I was reporting about this in Germany in 2015 and 2016, I think it still was the case, but perhaps it has changed since then. So tell us about what you call “the asylum lottery,” why the system is not as moral to the people who are in need around the world and perhaps in particular to the people who, including some of the people who made it here, as it seems, and explain to me how the system has changed since I clearly am operating on outdated information here.
Koopmans: Only on that particular point. Apart from that, your analysis is quite accurate. I think to understand how the asylum system has degenerated into what it currently is, you have to understand its origins.
The asylum and refugee system was created after the Second World War to prevent that we would ever get a repetition of what happened in the 1930s in Europe, when Jews tried to flee Nazi Germany and they were told at the Swiss or at the Dutch border, “we’ve already taken up 10,000 Jews last year, the border is closed,” and people were sent back to Nazi Germany, and many of these people died in the concentration camps.
To prevent that from happening again, the international community agreed, initially actually only with a geographical reference to Europe, in the Geneva Convention that countries were obliged to give people access who were asking for asylum, to give them access to an asylum procedure to establish whether they were really in need of protection, and also to grant them protection from the non-refoulement principle, as it is called. States are not allowed to send people back to countries where they are threatened with persecution.
That was an international rule that was created for a world in which people fled over relatively small distances, from Germany to Switzerland, from Germany to the Netherlands, to a bordering country. Sometimes that still happens. We talked earlier about Ukraine. That is what happens in the case of Ukraine, with Ukrainians fleeing over the Polish border. That is the classical situation for which the Geneva Convention was created.
Meanwhile, we live in a world where people travel over long distances. People know about countries at the other end of the world. There are airplanes. Airfares have become relatively cheap. If you cannot afford an airplane ticket, you can travel in other ways. The world has become much more connected. People also now have relatives or friends living in other countries of the world, so there are social connections.
In this world, we are now in a situation where we have an asylum right that was meant for people fleeing from neighboring countries, that is now being used by people everywhere in the world. You can travel through as many countries as you would like and you still have the right to asylum at the moment that you arrive in Europe.
The second part that makes it immoral is who can afford to make these long journeys, and who can afford the money to pay the smugglers that you need on that journey. Who is young, healthy, and male enough to be able to survive that strenuous journey over mountains, through deserts, and across the Mediterranean or the Atlantic. These are young, healthy males from families that have at least enough money to pay the smugglers, who then arrive in Europe and do not necessarily come from countries where there is political persecution or civil war.
Because everybody has the right to claim asylum and because we have such high barriers to expulsion, it is usually not possible to return people to their countries of origin, even if their asylum claim is rejected. At the same time, there are millions of refugees in the world who are in dire need of protection, who do not have the means to travel to Europe, or who are stuck in countries like Yemen or Myanmar that are too far away from any of the wealthy countries of the world, and where people are much too poor to be able to travel to Europe, or to the United States, Canada, or Australia.
We therefore have an extremely selective regime that helps many people who do not need it, that among those who do need help privileges those who are healthy, young, and relatively wealthy, and that leaves many other people alone. This does not even include all the people who die on the way into the European asylum system.
Of all the people who die on migration worldwide, according to data from the International Organization for Migration, 70 percent of these people die on the way to Europe, on the way into the European asylum system. These are not labor migrants or invited migrants. These are people who know, and are told by smugglers, how the European asylum system works.
That leads many people from West Africa, from countries where there are not very high levels of political persecution and where there are no civil wars, to travel to Europe and to cross the Mediterranean. Many die, are exploited, are enslaved, or are mutilated in the Sahara. Those who survive try to make it across the Mediterranean. Thousands die every year in the Mediterranean.
They do so because they know that once you are in Europe, you have a 90 percent plus guarantee that you can also stay in Europe. This is a perverse system that does not help those who need help most and that lures many people to risk their lives.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Ruud discuss how to reform the European asylum system and the potential impact of extreme political parties gaining power. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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