An integration council is a fine thing, but ideally you should also have integrating staff for it. In Nuremberg, the latter has fallen into a bit of a twilight these days, to say the least. There, when the newly elected council met, it became known what one of the councilors once said on one of the so-called social platforms: “Please understand that it’s easier for me to write ‘gypsy’ instead of ‘unemployed Roma ethnicity with criminal records'”.
Now you have to know that the Integration Council is one of the historic model institutions of the city of Nuremberg. Founded 50 years ago as the “Foreigners’ Advisory Board”, the body represents the interests of immigrants, which is no small task in a city like Nuremberg, where more than 40 percent of the residents have an international history.
The Council’s relationships with the parties have traditionally been rather loose, but the case ended up in the middle of the classic debates shortly before a state election. After all, the said councilor had run for one of the last places on the list for the CSU in the 2020 local elections, with the motto “Cohesion through integration”. Pictured next to today’s CSU Mayor Marcus König, she let it be known that successful integration is based on education, vocational training, language skills – and respect. Probably true.
The respect theorist has since apologized to the council. Her post was many years ago, she doesn’t understand why a “mosquito becomes an elephant”, she told BR into the microphone. Since then, however, further unpleasant ex-statements have appeared not only from her, but also from another councillor, also with an openly racist tongue. Sarcastes are already talking about the “disintegration council”.
Gülay Incesu-Asar says that all sorts of demands are now being made in political Nuremberg – the mayor must intervene immediately, the city council, the CSU – is all to some extent understandable. The managing director of the council also draws attention to the fact that most of these demands are not even legally possible. “Very sad” was the start of the Council, no question, “the fronts have hardened”.
If at the end of a debate there is the realization that immigrants – despite their own experiences of discrimination – can be just as disintegrating as non-immigrants when it comes to language, then one can still mature socially from this.