Do Erdoğan and Merkel need Kurds?

There are 82 million people living in Turkey. Almost five million people of Turkish descent live in Europe (3 million in Germany, about 350 000 in Austria),¹⁾Liste türkischer Bevölkerungsanteile nach Staat, Wikipedia.including many Kurds who can play an important role in ethnic exchange in Europe. Many migrants from Syria, Iran and Iraq who come to Europe via Turkey are also Kurds. They are also important for the demographic developments in Turkey.

The lie that has been untiringly told by EU propaganda since the 1950s is that the European industrialised countries need fresh skilled workers and specialists from Algeria (in France) or Turkey (in Germany), for example, because of the constantly slowing population growth. Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt made a fitting statement on the emigration of workers at the time of the economic miracle: “Basically, he [the then Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard] wanted to keep wage levels low by recruiting foreign workers. Instead I would have preferred the German wages to have risen”²⁾Helmut Schmidt, Giovanni di Lorenzo: On a cigarette with Helmut Schmidt. Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 2009, pp. 132-134.So the aim was to maximize the profits of the companies at the expense of the German workers, which ultimately led to decades of deflation and stagnation of the economy. The rest is a fairy tale of propaganda. If you take a closer look at who has come to Europe through this insane policy, you will immediately see that they are predominantly unskilled people (mainly because of family reunification) who do not fill any gaps in the economy, but form social and political hotspots and are supposed to slowly but surely exchange the indigenous population of the old continent. If we take a closer look at Turkey, we notice that most migrants do not come from the developed regions of western Turkey, but from the poor and educationally disadvantaged areas in the south and east of the country; the illiteracy rate in Turkey is on average 20%, in Anatolia even 60%. So it is not all Turks who come to Europe as migrants from Turkey, but mostly Kurds.

In 2015, at the peak of the wave of migrants in Germany, Ali Ertan Toprak, Federal Chairman of the Kurdish Community of Germany, recorded a clearly noticeable influx of Kurdish “refugees” into Germany. He estimated that about 150,000 Kurds came to Germany in the last two years. This would be a plus of 15%.³⁾Zahl der Kurden in Deutschland sprunghaft angestiegen, Kurdische Gemeinde Deutschland 2015.In recent years there have also been Kurds from Syria and Iraq who have come to Germany because of the political situation. The figures speak for themselves: in 2016, 36.9% of applications for asylum in Germany came from Syria (29% from Kurds). 13.3% of the asylum seekers came from Iraq (mainly Kurds from the north of the country)⁴⁾Das Bundesamt in Zahlen 2016, Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge 2017.The Kurds are a growing group of foreigners in Germany with particularly fertile women. The Federal Government speaks of human rights, of the rescue of refugees and of humanism; basically it is a matter of improving the declining fertility rates in Germany through fertile Kurds, Arabs and Africans.

In the Marmara region near Istanbul, the fertility rate is currently only 1.4, significantly lower than 4 years ago (see chart above) and only slightly higher than that in Germany. It is Turkey’s most developed region with the highest real estate prices, the lowest unemployment, where most foreign companies are located, where the educational level is high and where couples are planning fewer and fewer children (we know this social phenomenon well from Western Europe). It is quite different in the southeast, which the Erdogan wants to control and at the same time hates him – it is like a completely different country.

The western regions of Turkey are similar to eastern China – the development there is based on migrant workers from the poor regions. The migrant workers are not really willing to settle in the West in order to live on for generations as a hated minority – for them it is the only way to get some money for their families in their homeland. It is estimated that the population of Istanbul consists of 60% of internal immigrants. And in the southeast you need every cent, because the lower the standard of living, the closer to the war front, the closer to Syria, the more children there are in an average family.

Erdoğan is thus between anvil and hammer: on the one hand he cannot afford that the Kurdish militia YPG, which successfully fought against IS in Syria, eventually wins an independent state at the southern border of Turkey (hence his military offensive against positions of the YPG last year), on the other hand he has to soften his policy towards the Kurds living in Turkey and not downplay them, because without them the population of Turkey will never be “big” but in steep decline.

The problems within Turkey and the failure of Kemalist educational policies in Anatolia and Kurdistan are directly transferred to the population structure in Western Turkey and Western Europe. Anyone who doubts this fact should take a look at the data on the educational status, results or perspectives of migrants from Turkey. “The level of achievement of pupils with a Turkish migration background corresponds to the level of achievement of pupils from other Muslim countries. (…) They are the only ones to have language problems to a large extent, at the same time they form an essential part of the underclass and of the transfer population in Germany, and their children have the greatest difficulties in the German education system”.⁵⁾Germany abolishes itself, Thilo Sarrazin, DVA, 2016, p.235Among Turkish citizens living in Germany, 54% have no qualifications, 44% have vocational training and only 2% have a university degree. Among Germans of Turkish origin, the figures are 33%, 44% and 10% respectively⁶⁾Ebenda, p.284. Qualified specialists? Do we want such “integration”, such highly qualified members of our society in the future?