Foreign nationalities. For years Chancellor Helmut Kohl has been saying that Germany is friendly towards foreigners. And quite rightly so, as the statistics prove. Of Germany's more than 80 million inhabitants 6.5 million are from abroad. They were all glad to come and stay in Germany. For decades there were no racial problems. The category of "guest workers", initially consisting of Italians, was extended to include Greeks and Spaniards, and then Portuguese, Yugoslavs and Turks. Occasional tensions within the community were far outweighed by the friendships made with neighbours and colleagues at work.
Integration within the European Community and the western world, the dissolution of the eastern bloc, and the immigration of people from Asian and African countries naturally meant a considerable increase in the number of foreigners of different colour in Germany. The Turks, who number 1,855,000, have long been the largest foreign community, followed by people from the states which belonged to the former Yugoslavia whose number, including war refugees, can only be roughly assessed at one million because of the many war refugees. Next are the Italians (558,000), the Greeks (346,000), Poles (286,000), Austrians (185,000), Romanians (167,000) and Spaniards (134,000). Iranian, Portuguese, British, Americans and Dutch each number between 100,000 and 115,000, and the Bulgarians, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks and Frendch each between60,000 and 90,000. When speaking of foreigners we today think of people of non-European origin, the 86,000 Vietnamese, 80,000 Moroccans, 53,000 Lebanese, 44,000 Sri Lankans, 42,000 Afghans and 36,000 Indians. The 61,000 people from the former Soviet Union are more conspicuous in the eastern part of the country than in the west.
Nearly 60% of all foreigners have been living in Ger many for ten years or more. Over two thirds of foreign children were born here. The Federal Republic has not only proved itself to be an open society by bringing in workers, their families, asylum-seekers and war refugees. It has always been a champion of free movement of labour within the European Community. Germany's willingness to open her doors to foreigners who have been persecuted on political grounds compares favour ably with that of other countries. The new article 16a of the Basic Law, like the previous article 16, still guarantees protection from political persecution in the form of an individual basic right. In 1992, for instance, Germany alone took in nearly 80% of all people seeking asylum in the whole of the European Community. In 1989 the number seeking asylum in Germany was 121,318, m 1991 the figure rose to 256,112, and then to 438,191 in 1992. At the same time the proportion of those who could be recognized as genuine victims of persecution fell to less than 5%. In 1993, up to the end of August, some 260,00 asylum-seekers entered Germany. Their number fell significantly when the new legislation became effective on 1 July 1993.
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