IMMIGRATION, ASYLUM, AND ANTI-FOREIGNER VIOLENCE IN GERMANY

In the early 1990s, Germany went through a difficult debate about chan ges in its generous asylum laws. Much more dramatic, however, were the increases in the number of violent attacks against foreigners (and al so some Germans), mainly by alienated young males. The paper discusses both, the asylum migration acid the ethnocentric violence, and also p ossible connections between the two. In the first part, we present a t ypology of the perpetrators and various theories which try to explain the new violence, such as: Nazi revival, modernization theory, a theor y of civilizational crisis, political culture and dominance culture, a nd hegemonic masculinity/masculinity crisis. In the second part, we di scuss the problems of mass migration and asylum applications, and in p articular the debate about it. This debate has contributed indirectly to the violence, although it is not its root cause: through open racis m, through scapegoating, and also through a polarization between the t wo 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 s uggestions as how to deal with both immigration and violence against f oreigners.