germany population by race

Several scholars have concluded that ethnic diversity has negative consequences for social trust. Drawing upon a nationally representative sample of the German population , we make two contributions to this debate. First, we examine how ethnic diversity at the neighborhood level–specifically the proportion of immigrants in the neighborhood–is linked to social trust focusing on the compositional effect of poverty. Second, in contrast to the majority of current research on ethnic diversity, we use a behavioral measure of trust in combination with fine-grained (zip-code level) contextual measures of ethnic composition and poverty. Furthermore, we are also able to compare the behavioral measure to a standard attitudinal trust question.

We find that household poverty partially accounts for lower levels of trust, and that after controlling for income, German and non-German respondents are equally trusting. However, being surrounded by neighbors with immigrant background is also associated with lower levels of social trust. Over the last decade, scholars in political science, economics, and sociology have repeatedly debated whether ethnic diversity constitutes a threat to social cohesion. While a few empirical studies have concluded that ethnic diversity has a negative effect on trust in the U.S. [1–2], as well as in some European countries [3–8], this line of research has been challenged on both conceptual and methodological grounds [9–13]. First we examine how ethnic diversity at the neighborhood level–specifically the proportion of immigrants in the neighborhood–is linked to social trust focusing on the compositional effect of poverty. Second, we use a novel behavioral measure of trust from a trust game embedded in a large-scale survey with a representative sample of the German population together with newly available fine-grained contextual data on neighborhood ethnic diversity and poverty.

This article investigates the relationship between ethnic diversity, poverty and social trust in Germany. We expected to find a negative relationship between diversity and trust, and hypothesized that this relationship could be explained, at least in part, by two compositional effects related to the ethnicity and poverty of the people who live in diverse neighborhoods. Our first major result is that poverty is indeed significantly and negatively related to social trust. In adding to this literature, we also add to the growing scholarship on the detrimental effects of poverty on individual behavior [32, 34–36].

This trust game was administered to a randomly selected subgroup of 1,315 people of the existing GSOEP panel, of which 658 played in the role of the trustor . There was also a second smaller sample of 117 participants who played a trust game with 100 EUR instead of 10 EUR. To ensure comparability, we only look at the sample that received 10 EUR. We focus on the subsample of Western German participants, as the simultaneous analysis of individual- and context-level socio-economic status and ethnic diversity is only fully plausible in this context. Due to its history as part of the communist bloc, Eastern Germany did not see the high levels of immigration that have shaped the demographic profile of Western Germany.

As a result, not only is the structural relationship between diversity and trust likely to be different in the East, but there is also very little variation in terms of neighborhood diversity in the East German sample. Indeed, ethnic diversity in the Eastern part of Germany is much smaller than in the West (i.e. less than 1% of the GSOEP trust game participants in the East are foreign citizens versus 6.5% in the West), thus creating problems of convergence in the statistical analysis. Our final sample therefore consists of 551 Western German individuals who were Player 1 (i.e. the "truster") in the trust game in the years 2003 to 2005, resulting in 1,483 observations in total.

Germany is a Western European nation with an estimated population of 81 million people. The country is primarily home to ethnic Germans and many ethnic minority groups. Before 1950, Germany was mainly occupied by ethnic Germans and very few ethnic minorities. Over time, many more immigrants moved to Germany seeking asylum, economic opportunities, education, and better living standards. Ethnic minorities in the country include Turks, Poles, Italians, and Russians.

Irreligion is the largest religious group in the country, followed by Christianity. The answer for policymakers lies at the community level as well as the state and federal level. Modern diversity policy has the task of bringing citizens into a dialogue across ethnic, cultural and religious boundaries.

This requires institutions that act as mediators, supporting people as they express their interests to each other and develop from these a common commitment. It is also important to build the skills of dealing with diversity starting early on, in early childhood centers and in schools. Finally, what is needed is a dialogue across the whole society, based on our fundamental rights and a democratic culture of debate, in which we can negotiate a new self-awareness of Germany as a country of immigration.

Finally, while the proportion of neighbors with immigrant background, is neither the only nor the most powerful predictor of social trust, this indicator remains significant even after controlling for respondents' immigration status and household income. In fact, the coefficient of neighborhood ethnic diversity remains substantively unchanged when controlling for individual level confounders. Our results thus suggest that social cohesion in Germany, is related not only to individual and household characteristics, but also to characteristics of the immediate neighborhood (cp. ).

While the use of such fine-grained data is common in other countries , studies on ethnic diversity in Germany usually had to resort to more aggregate measures (e.g. ). To the best of our knowledge, a similar design using a representative sample and a behavioral trust game has only been implemented at a much smaller scale in the UK and the Netherlands . Since the end of the Second World War, France has become an ethnically diverse country. Today, approximately five percent of the French population is non-European and non-white. This does not approach the number of non-white citizens in the United States (roughly 15-25%, depending on how Latinos are classified). Nevertheless, it amounts to at least three million people, and has forced the issues of ethnic diversity onto the French policy agenda.

France has developed an approach to dealing with ethnic problems that stands in contrast to that of many advanced, industrialized countries. Unlike the United States, Britain, or even the Netherlands, France maintains a "color-blind" model of public policy. This means that it targets virtually no policies directly at racial or ethnic groups.

Instead, it uses geographic or class criteria to address issues of social inequalities. It has, however, developed an extensive anti-racist policy repertoire since the early 1970s. Until recently, French policies focused primarily on issues of hate speech—going much further than their American counterparts-and relatively less on issues of discrimination in jobs, housing, and in provision of goods and services. After the war ended, the German government did not re-implement national minority rights for ethnic Poles. The reason for this is that the areas of Germany which formerly had a native Polish minority were annexed to Poland and the Soviet Union, while almost all of the native German populations in these areas subsequently fled or were expelled by force.

With the mixed German-Polish territories now lost, the German government subsequently regarded ethnic Poles residing in what remained of Germany as immigrants, just like any other ethnic population with a recent history of arrival. In contrast, Germans living in Poland are recognized as national minority and have granted seats in Polish Parliament. It must be said, however, that an overwhelming number of Germans in Poland have centuries-old historical ties to the lands they now inhabit, whether from living in territory that once belonged to the German state, or from centuries-old communities. In contrast, most Poles in present-day Germany are recent immigrants, though there are some communities which have been present since the 19th and perhaps even the 18th centuries. In conclusion, France has maintained its official color-blind approach to race relations in spite of growing numbers of ethnic minorities on its territory and in contrast to other European countries facing similar demographic shifts. In part, this tendency can be explained by the Revolutionary and Republican traditions of treating all citizens equally before the law.

In part, this can be accounted for by the memory of France's Vichy history and by the fears among the mainstream political class of a revival of far-right politics as embodied by the National Front. There are, however, pressures for more race- or ethnicity-conscious institutions in France. More recent work has proceeded to qualify the negative relationship between ethnic diversity and trust, often challenging the argument that ethnic diversity per se has detrimental effects on social cohesion. In particular, recent analyses have highlighted the importance of two compositional effects. Once one takes into account that whites have higher levels of trust than Latinos and blacks, and that diverse neighborhoods have fewer whites, the supposedly negative effect of ethnic diversity disappears.

Similar ethnoracial compositional effects have also been found in Europe [15–17]. In Putnam's own words, Americans living in heterogeneous communities tend to "hunker down", withdrawing from public and social life . The First World War was a watershed experience for the ethnic minorities who had come to the United States in record numbers at the turn of the last century. Though the overwhelming majority of immigrants supported their adoptive country both on the battlefield and on the home front, the United States government cracked down on enemy aliens with some of the most harshly repressive measures in American history. The Great War significantly hastened the assimilation of foreign-born soldiers and their families, changed United States immigration law, and influenced the way immigrants and enemy aliens were treated during the Second World War. Several countries, in particular the Czech Republic, Italy, Greece, Slovenia, and Slovakia, only showed a population growth in 2005 because of immigration.

In other countries, such as Germany and Hungary, recent population decline would have been much larger without a positive migration balance. The EU-25, in 2005, had an overall net migration rate of +3.7 per 1,000 inhabitants and a net gain from international migration of +1.8 million people. This accounts for almost 85 percent of Europe's total population growth in 2005. In western Germany, however, little was done to reverse the trend in low fertility. Fertility has remained below 1.5 children per woman since 1975, and at times considerably below.

Obstacles to increasing the birth rate are similar to other low-fertility countries, particularly people's lack of confidence in their economic future. Day care centers usually close at 1 p.m., a burden on the growing number of two-earner families. Social attitudes tend to disfavor leaving one's child in the care of someone else for the entire day. Mothers who do leave their children all day are often considered to be "raven mothers" because a raven abandons her young at an early age.

But this attitude may be slowly changing with growing acknowledgment of a birth rate crisis. The government took little direct action until well after 2000, despite growing concern over the diminished number of young people and its effect on supporting pension programs and virtually free health care, particularly for the elderly. A population pyramid illustrates the age and sex structure of a country's population and may provide insights about political and social stability, as well as economic development. The population is distributed along the horizontal axis, with males shown on the left and females on the right.

The male and female populations are broken down into 5-year age groups represented as horizontal bars along the vertical axis, with the youngest age groups at the bottom and the oldest at the top. The shape of the population pyramid gradually evolves over time based on fertility, mortality, and international migration trends. What Germany does document is the country of origin of recent immigrants. According to official statistics,one in five German residents are now first or second-generation immigrants, meaning either they were born in another country or have one parent born in another country. (For a rough sense of comparison, 11% of France's population has at least one immigrant parent.) Among German voters, one in tenhave a migrant background.

The country's largest immigrant block is made up of ethnic Germans from largely former Soviet countries (largely known as Spätaussiedler) and Turkish Germans. They were persecuted by the Nazis, and thousands of Roma living in Germany were killed by the Nazi regime. Nowadays, they are spread all over Germany, mostly living in major cities. It is difficult to estimate their exact number, as the German government counts them as "persons without migrant background" in their statistics.

A vague figure given by the German Department of the Interior is about 70,000. In contrast to the old-established Roma population, the majority of them do not have German citizenship, they are classified as immigrants or refugees. We do not display the results for the independent and zip-code level controls in the main manuscript, but full regression tables can be found in the Supporting Information . We find that our results remain substantively unchanged when excluding foreign citizens from the sample. In order to determine the ethnic diversity and socio-economic status of the local context in which GSOEP respondents live, we use data from the Microm-RWI raster-dataset .

The Microm-RWI data provides information on purchasing power and ethnic composition at the level of 1x1km grid raster cells for the whole of Germany. This exceptionally fine-grained data allows us to calculate indicators of the ethnic fractionalization and relative wealth for all zip code areas in Germany. The zip-code level is the most precise geo-information available through the GSOEP for locating participants' place of residence. The RWI-Microm data is available from 2005 onwards only, i.e. the last year during which the trust game was played. We therefore use the 2005 values as contextual measures for observations from all three years, under the assumption that neither the ethnic composition, nor the socio-economic status of a local area have changed dramatically in the course of these three years.

During this three–year period, 94% of the sample remained living in the same apartment and 78% even reported to have lived in that same residence for 10 years or longer. Moreover, ethnically heterogeneous areas also tend to be poorer, and thus concentrated economic disadvantage, rather than ethnoracial diversity, might be at the basis of their lower cooperative capacity [13, 18–20]. The concentration of poverty in highly diverse areas is not just a common phenomenon in the United States but also in Europe [11, 21–26]. In the German context, too, individuals of "migration background" tend to live in neighborhoods that are both ethnically more diverse and poorer than comparable adjacent neighborhoods . In fact, most studies on ethnic diversity and social capital control for income or unemployment status in their analyses at the individual and/or neighborhood level, albeit typically in order to avoid reporting spurious effects (, p. 467).

Studies that explicitly compare the effects of ethnic heterogeneity and socioeconomic deprivation are rare but have shown that the negative effects of economic deprivation outweigh those of ethnic diversity in the UK . In the U.S. the relatively robust fertility rate has slowed the aging of the population, while in Germany and Italy, lower fertility has hastened it. In other words, American women were expected to have about two children in their lifetimes, on average.4 At the same time, the total fertility rate in Germany and Italy has plummeted to about 1.4 and 1.5 children per woman, respectively. Projections suggest that in the coming decades, the total fertility rate in the United States will likely remain at about two children per woman. Come 2050, the U.S. rate will still be higher than that of Germany or Italy, where total fertility rates are projected to reach 1.7 and 1.8, respectively. Prior to the 1950s there were few ethnic minorities in Germany, except Jews, whose population was decimated during the Holocaust.

Of the so-called "guest workers" and their families who immigrated to Germany beginning in the mid-1950s, the largest group is of Turkish ancestry. Distinct both culturally and religiously, they are scattered throughout German cities. In 2019 there were also a growing number of at least 529,000 black Afro-Germans defined as people with an African migrant background. Out of them more than 400 thousand have a citizenship of a Subsahara-African country, with others being German citizens. Numerous persons from northern African Tunisia and Morocco live in Germany. While they are considered members of a minority group, for the most part, they do not considers themselves "Afro-Germans," nor are most of them perceived as such by the German people.

However, Germany does not keep any statistics regarding ethnicity or race. The article begins with the period immediately preceding the war, describing the ethnic composition of the United States and the social conditions of immigrants in 1914. Next it addresses the social unrest that arose during the nearly three years of American neutrality.

Could immigrant recruits serve effectively if they spoke little English and clung to the customs and traditions of their countries of origin? This article addresses these questions by exploring both the impact of the war on America's ethnic minorities and by examining how the United States government and military dealt with immigrant recruits and enemy aliens during the period of the Great War. By 1950 the newly established Federal Republic of Germany had a population of about 50 million, more than 9 million of whom were "expellees." The German Democratic Republic had about 4 million newcomers and 14 million natives. Between 1950 and 1989, West Germany's population grew from 50 million to 62.1 million. Resettled Germans and refugees from former eastern territories and their families constituted approximately 20 percent of the country's population.

From its earliest years, West Germany had become either a temporary or a final destination for millions of migrants. Yet despite this influx, the country did not develop an identity as a country of immigration as did, for example, the United States or Canada. Germany Table of ContentsSince the first unification of Germany in 1871 to form the German Empire, the population and territorial expanse of Germany have fluctuated considerably, chiefly as a result of gains and losses in war.

At the time of its founding, the empire was home to some 41 million people, most of whom lived in villages or small towns. As industrialization and urbanization accelerated over the next forty years, the population increased significantly to 64.6 million, according to the 1910 census. About two-thirds of this population lived in towns with more than 2,000 inhabitants, and the number of large cities had grown from eight in 1871 to eighty-four in 1910. Stimulating population growth were improvements in sanitary and working conditions and in medicine.

Another significant source of growth was an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe, who came to Germany to work on farms and in mines and factories. This wave of immigrants, the first of several groups that would swell Germany's population in the succeeding decades, helped compensate for the millions of Germans who left their country in search of a better life, many of whom went to the United States. Political leaders are nonetheless aware that race and ethnicity matter.