Immigration, Asylum, and Anti-Foreigner Violence in Germany

In the early 1990s, Germany went through a difficult debate about changes in its generous asylum laws. Much more dramatic, however, were the increases in the number of violent attacks against foreigners (and also some Germans), mainly by alienated young males. The paper discusses both, the asylum migration and the ethnocentric violence, and also possible connections between the two. In the first part, we present a typology of the perpetrators and various theories which try to explain the new violence, such as: Nazi revival, modernization theory, a theory of civilizational crisis, political culture and dominance culture, and hegemonic masculinity/masculinity crisis. In the second part, we discuss the problems of mass migration and asylum applications, and in particular the debate about it. This debate has contributed indirectly to the violence, although it is not its root cause: through open racism, through scapegoating, and also through a polarization between the two major political camps. In this polarization, different ideological traditions have led to the denial of new dimensions of social reality: the reality of multiculturalism as well as the necessity of limiting and regulating migration. In the final section, we offer a number of suggestions as how to deal with both immigration and violence against foreigners.