FOLLOWING THE EUROPEAN UNION

reforms of 04-05 which streamlined the process to get more immigrants

.or am I wrong?

As Walter hints at when the German identity feels like it is getting submerged into the EU stew and vanishing there is not a lot of tolerance for non Germanic culture with-in Germany itself. Hell, they have already given up the Mark, the beer purity standards, and been inundated with cheap non local sausage...and the Ostlanders..At some point this needs to stop.

Yes. On the other, if you call someone earning more than (minimum) 60,000 Euros per year a "cheap labourer". you're correct.

but from my research on minimum wage, France's minimum wage is a little above US$22,000. I'm not sure how Germany's minimum can be 60,000 euros.

Germany's cabinet approved a plan on 16 July, 2008 that will attempt to reduce skilled labor shortages in sectors such as engineering and information technology.

"We have taken a step toward making Germany more competitive internationally," said Social Democrat Labor Minister Olaf Scholz, co-author of the plan with Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble.

"We are putting the conditions in place so that people can come here who can contribute to creating economic growth," he added.

According to estimates from the German government and other sources, the shortage of computer specialists, engineers, and other skilled workers is costing the country 20 billion Euros a year.

The approved measures include allowing graduates from new European Union member states to work freely in Germany from 01 January, 2009. These individuals will no longer have to prove that a German worker could not be found to fill the position.

To work in Germany, graduates from outside the EU will still have to show that a German citizen could not be found to fill the job. The German government will also reduce the wage that highly skilled foreign workers have to earn to be approved for a work permit from 86,400 euros to 63,600 euros

"Creating a permanent crisis resolution mechanism without insisting on healthy budgets is like stocking cholesterol pills while continuing to binge on bratwurst and chateaubriand.”
http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2010/10/governing_euro&fsrc=nwl

Germany's Merkel is right -- multiculturalism has failedBy David Frum, CNN Contributor
The Germans, for obvious reasons, prefer their politicians dull. The current German chancellor, Angela Merkel, more than meets local expectations. So on the rare occasion when Merkel says something vivid, something important must be going on.

It is.

Speaking in Potsdam on Saturday, Chancellor Merkel told a gathering of young Christian Democrats that multiculturalism has failed.

That might seem to be saying the obvious
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In the United States, immigrants are less likely than the native-born to collect welfare or other social benefits. In Europe, immigrants are radically more likely than the native-born to collect welfare and social benefits, with Third World immigrants collecting the most of all. That's the findings of a 2005 study by researchers at Prague's Charles University.

European voters have absorbed these uncomfortable data into a suspicious view of newcomer intentions: According to a recent study by the Friedrich Ebert think tank, 34.3 percent of Germans believe that migrants come to Germany primarily to receive welfare benefits.

Merkel's Potsdam speech did not cite those social problems.

In Germany, the problems created by immigration literally go without saying, and those who do try to talk about them rapidly find themselves ejected from public life. Thilo Sarrazin, a governor of the Bundesbank (and it's worth mentioning, a member of the left-of-center Social Democratic party) was pressured to resign his post in September after publishing a book arguing the failure of Germany's absorption of immigrants.

Yet in the words of Sigmund Freud, the repressed always return

Merkel faces pressure to take a tougher line on immigration, particularly on so-called "integrationsverweigerer" or those immigrants who show a lack of willingness to adapt to the majority culture, by, for example, refusing to attend German language classes.

While trying to embrace both sides of the debate, including repeatedly calling on Germans to accept that foreigners are a part of their country, Merkel cannot have ignored the popular response with which Sarrazin's book was received, nor the repeated polls in which Germans have indicated a growing intolerance towards immigrants which observers say is linked to fears about economic stability, even though the economy is showing strong signs of recovery.

Last week a study by the Friedrich Ebert foundation found more than 30% of people questioned agreed that Germany was "overrun by foreigners", while a similar number said they believed that some immigrants had only come to Germany to take advantage of its social welfare, and therefore "should be sent home when jobs are scarce".

Sarrazin is of course the guy who had the balls to write a book that violated the PC laws, and thus was punished. The masses have firmly supported both him and the correctness of his statements

In a nutshell, Mr Sarrazin’s argument is that the right sort of German women are having too few babies and that the wrong sort—Muslims and those with little education—are having too many. The result is not only that Germany’s population is shrinking, it is also getting dumber. “With higher relative fertility among the less intelligent, the average intelligence of the population declines,” he writes.

Doch die Initiative, die gegen die Bezeichnung “easyCredit- Stadion“ kämpft...In der Landeshauptstadt tritt der Versicherungskonzern Allianz als Namensgeber des Stadions auf. Doch der derzeitige Name der Nürnberger Arena genieße “keinerlei Akzeptanz“. Vielmehr noch: “Ganz Deutschland lacht über diesen Namen“

The Allianz Arena is home to Bayern Munich, ...

On March 14, 2006, the stadium was renamed EasyCredit-Stadion, for a period of five years, after a financing product of the German bank DZ Bank AG.

The tragedy of the Euromess is that the creation of the euro was supposed to be the finest moment in a grand and noble undertaking: the generations-long effort to bring peace, democracy and shared prosperity to a once and frequently war-torn continent. But the architects of the euro, caught up in their project’s sweep and romance, chose to ignore the mundane difficulties a shared currency would predictably encounter — to ignore warnings, which were issued right from the beginning, that Europe lacked the institutions needed to make a common currency workable. Instead, they engaged in magical thinking, acting as if the nobility of their mission transcended such concerns.