Turkish and German?

Marriage is not just an aspect of the immigration problem in Germany; to a growing extent, it is the immigration problem. Starting in the 1960s, millions of Turkish “guest workers” were imported to provide manpower for the German economic boom. The guest-worker program was ended in 1973, the year of the first oil crisis, but large-scale immigration from Turkey has scarcely abated since. For years, political asylum was relatively easy for Turks to obtain, owing to political assassinations, military coups and the violent Kurdish nationalist movement in eastern Anatolia. But since the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Germany, like most European countries, has steadily tightened its criteria for political asylum.

 

This leaves open only one avenue for non-European men and women who want to enter Germany legally: marriage to someone with legal residency in the country. Fortunately for would-be immigrants, young ethnic Turks in Germany have a strong tendency to marry people from the home country. Exact statistics are hard to come by, but it is possible that as many as 50 percent of Turks (a word that in common parlance often includes even those with German citizenship) seek their spouses abroad... After half a century of immigration, every new generation of Turks is still, to a large extent, a first generation...