Schmidt says non-European immigration was a mistake

Helmut Schmidt, a smart man and never one to suffer fools gladly (remember his interactions with Jimmy Carter?), has adopted the Auster view, expressed recently at FrontPage Magazine, that large-scale, conspicuous ethnic diversity, a.k.a. multiculturalism, cannot work in a democratic country. To my knowledge, this is the first time that a leader or former leader of any major Western country has said that mass Third-World immigration and the resulting ethnic diversity are a bad idea. Margaret Thatcher may have thought it, but, as best as I remember, she never said it. According to The Telegraph:

Helmut Schmidt, the former German chancellor, has inflamed the country’s debate on immigration by saying that multiculturalism can only work under authoritarian regimes, and that bringing millions of Turkish guest workers to Germany was a mistake.

“The concept of multiculturalism is difficult to make fit with a democratic society,” he told the Hamburger Abendblatt newspaper.

He added that it had been a mistake that during “the early 1960s we brought guest workers from foreign cultures into the country”.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 15, 2004 01:42 PM | Send