By Victoria Salazar
“ A problem in our cityscapes,” “Social tourism by refugees,” “Being German is more than just a passport,” “Dangerous parallel societies”
These statements, emanating from Germany’s political leadership, are not rhetorical slips. They are the carefully curated vocabulary of a resurgent political project, one that frames human movement as a pathology to be diagnosed and excised. This rhetoric, however, is not an isolated phenomenon. It is the contemporary dialect of a much older, more insidious grammar: The colonial logic of classification, extraction, and control. The 2025 German policy orientation, a clear pivot toward restriction: Reduced inflows, suspended family reunification, streamlined deportations, and the chilling proposition of extraterritorial “return hubs”, is not merely a political shift to the right. It is the modern state apparatus enacting an ancient mandate: to manage populations, to sort the “deserving” from the “disposable,” and to safeguard the racial and economic hierarchy of a presumed national body. This is governance as border maintenance, where the border is not just a geographical line but a bureaucratic, social, and epistemic reality that follows racialised bodies into the very heart of the society that demands their labour.
This debate, saturated with talk of “failed integration,” deliberately obscures the foundational truth: the crisis is not one of migrant presence, but of a national imagination stunted by colonial amnesia. This analysis centres the intersection of racial, gendered, and class violence, revealing Germany’s migration panic as a systemic refusal to share space, power, and history. It exposes the fiction of the “expat,” the machinery of bureaucratic precarity, and the profound historical forgetting that allows a nation of migrants to vilify migration.
The Assimilation Paradox and the Colonial Extraction of Body and Labour
The state narrates a story of a generous reception met with cultural intransigence. It laments the “failure of integration” of thousands, pointing to language deficits or cultural insularity. Yet, its prescribed model of “integration” is, in practice, a demand for assimilation, a one-way process of cultural surrender that offers only conditional, perpetually probationary belonging. The Turkish community stands as the enduring testament to this paradox. After six decades of foundational labour in the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), of building cities and industries with their hands, their full acceptance as co-equals in the German social fabric remains negotiable and perpetually questioned. The problem, therefore, is not the migrant’s inability to become German enough. It is the nation’s inability to conceive of itself as changed, enriched, and fundamentally co-authored by our presence.
This paradox is rooted in a colonial worldview that splits the racialised subject into useful fragments and threatening wholes. Our labour is desired; our embodied social presence is feared. Our muscles are needed to lift, build, and clean; our cultures are mined for culinary “diversity” and musical “exotica.” Yet, our epistemologies, our ways of knowing, relating, and organising society, are dismissed. Our bodies in public space are scrutinised as potential disruptions to a presumed social order. This is the unspoken colonial bargain: Europe has always been willing to extract the riches of the Global South, its resources, its artefacts, its human energy, while recoiling from the transformative, equalising presence of the people attached to them.
This extraction is not merely historical; it is actively reproduced through a bureaucratic regime designed to manufacture precarity. The discourse of “managing flows” and “streamlining procedures” masks a Kafkaesque reality of administered despair. I lived this reality: caught for months in the purgatory of a pending work permit renewal. The law creates an impossible trap: you need a job to secure your legal right to remain, but no employer will hire you without a valid permit. The state, through its immigration offices (Ausländerbehörde), becomes a fortress of impassive silence, phone lines eternally busy, emails unanswered, appointments mythologised. This institutional indifference is not a sign of incompetence; rather, it is a disciplinary tool.
The only “choice” this system offers is descent into the shadow economy: under-the-table work, without contract, without protections, for wages that mock the concept of dignity. It is a vortex of anxiety, stress, and profound frustration, a deliberate state of destabilisation. This experience is not an anecdotal misfortune; it is the standard operating procedure for hundreds of thousands of YREMASUD. The system functions precisely as intended: it creates a readily available, politically silenced, and economically exploitable underclass. It extracts our physical productivity while ensuring we remain in a state of suspended legality, too terrified of deportation to demand workers’ rights, yet desperate enough to accept any condition. This is the brutal class reality glossed over by debates about “Leitkultur.” (dominant culture)
The Selective Amnesia of a Migrant Nation and the “Expat” Alibi
A people without memory is a people without history, and Germany practices a form of profoundly selective amnesia. This amnesia operates on two crucial levels: the historical and the contemporary.
Historically, it forgets its own colonial project. The genocide of the Herero and Nama in Namibia, the brutal suppression of the Maji Maji rebellion in Tanzania, and the commercial enclaves and settler colonies it established across South America are not distant footnotes. They are foundational acts that established a global racial and economic hierarchy, plundered continents, and created the destabilised political and climatic conditions that drive displacement today. Germany’s current wealth is, in part, built on this unrepaired colonial debt. Yet, this history is conspicuously absent from the mainstream “migration debate,” allowing the narrative to frame movement from other regions as an inexplicable onslaught, rather than a consequence of intertwined histories.
This amnesia becomes hypocrisy in the contemporary moment. Consider the German who moves to Palma de Mallorca for their sunny retirement or to Bali for the “digital nomad” lifestyle. They are never called “immigrants.” They are expats.” This terminological sleight-of-hand is the racial and class alibi of continued colonial thinking. The word “expatriate” implies a temporary, privileged sojourn by a citizen of a wealthy, typically white, nation. It carries no stigma of need, no whiff of desperation. It is a label of agency and choice.
The irony is blinding. These “expats” frequently form the most insular of communities. They often fail to learn the local language beyond transactional phrases. They cluster in neighbourhoods that become German or English-speaking enclaves, driving up property prices and altering the social fabric for native residents. They exhibit, in short, the very behaviours, cultural separation, economic pressure on local communities, that are decried as “failed integration” and the creation of “parallel societies” when practised by racialised others in Germany.
This cognitive dissonance reveals the core truth: The label “immigrant” has been racialised and pauperised. It is applied to those whose movement is perceived as arising from need, from poverty, from the “underdevelopment” of their origins. The German fear, as I noted, is viscerally one of “catching the brown poverty” associated with the racialised Global Majority. The “expat” maintains the fantasy of uncontaminated, superior mobility. This is the essence of colonial class anxiety: a frantic project to maintain the global hierarchy that grants unchecked mobility and privilege to some, while policing and criminalising the necessary movement of others. But do not take me wrong, of course it is not “all Germans”, but to witness this hypocrisy and remain silent also makes you part of the problem.
Re-imagining Sovereignty from the Cracks: The YREMASUD and a Politics of Radical Community
Therefore, on this International Migrants Day, our task must extend beyond critique. We must articulate and honour the world already being built in the fissures of this exclusionary system. The state’s ideological push toward a hyper-individualised, atomised “independent lifestyle” is a political strategy. It seeks to dissolve solidarity, to render us isolated, competitively vulnerable, and thus politically passive. It wants us to face the Ausländerbehörde alone, to negotiate with exploitative employers alone, to suffer our anxiety in silence.
Our most potent resistance has been to refuse this isolation. Our power emerges, organically and necessarily, from the community of the precaritised: the YREMASUD. These are not just categories of legal status; they are the basis for networks of profound mutual aid that constitute an alternative social fabric. We operate a shadow infrastructure of survival that the state will not provide: Social media groups where we share the elusive phone numbers of sympathetic case workers; apartments passed along to newcomers facing homelessness; informal childcare collectives; kitchens where food and strategies are shared. These acts of care are not charity. They are the practical, daily enactment of a decolonial feminist politics, one that values interdependence over individualism, collective care over state-sanctioned neglect, and the sovereignty found in solidarity over the brittle autonomy offered by a system that wishes us gone.
In a political economy that commodifies every human relationship and emotion, choosing empathy and practising community-based care is a profoundly revolutionary act. This is not naiveté. It is the sophisticated, hard-won wisdom of those who have learned that their inherent value is not contingent on a passport, a residency permit, or the approval of a bureaucrat. It is the strength to demand dignified work, stable papers, and unconditional respect, to take the space historically denied to us, while steadfastly refusing to replicate the dehumanising, exploitative logic of our oppressors. To be humane and kind in such a system, while being unyielding in our self-defence, is to build the ethical foundation of a future from the ground up. This future demands we decouple human dignity from bureaucratic status, confront Germany’s national myth of innocence, and recognise the community infrastructures of the YREMASUD as the blueprints for a true pluralism.
We are not supplicants at the gate of a fortress Europe. We are the global majority, the living, breathing consequence of the colonial and capitalist histories Germany has profited from. We are here, in part, because they were there. Our presence is not an interruption; it is a continuation of a shared, albeit violently unequal, story. We carry the memory they have forgotten, and we are already building the future of radical solidarity, whose borders cannot contain.
This future is not an invasion, but a natural change. As the great Argentine voice Mercedes Sosa sang with the weight of history and hope: “Cambia lo superficial, cambia también lo profundo… Todo cambia, yo cambio, no es una novedad.”
Our presence here is not news. It is life, insisting on its course. This International Migrants Day, that insistence is our only commemoration.
