As Spains economy cools, what happens to the millions of recent immigrants?
BERLIN, Germany—”Turks are nice!” declared posters plastered all over the Berlin subways during the 1980s. There are no touchy-feely directives on the walls today, but political correctness is still pervasive here. The Holocaust casts a long shadow in this country, and part of the atonement is an unspoken rule against bashing the country’s 7.8 million residents of foreign descent. Hesse state Premier Ronald Koch pushed the boundaries a little too far when he ran for re-election at the end of January 2008. When two young toughs from Greece and Turkey viciously attacked a pensioner on the Munich subway in December 2007, Koch railed against “criminal young foreigners” on the campaign trail. That rallying cry probably wouldn’t have doomed his chances in the Netherlands or Austria, two countries with an immigrant population that looks pretty similar to Germany’s. In the economic boom years of the 1960s and early ’70s, the three European nations imported “guest workers.” While the expectatio
