It is not just the U.S. that is seeing a significant increase in anti-immigrant sentiment in the middle of this worldwide capitalistic recession. Agence France Presse has a story about the German chancellor’s moving to more of an aggressive anti-Islamic-immigrant stance:

Germany’s attempt to create a multi-cultural society has failed completely, Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the weekend, calling on the country’s immigrants to learn German and adopt Christian values. Merkel weighed in for the first time in a blistering debate sparked by a central bank board member saying the country was being made “more stupid” by poorly educated and unproductive Muslim migrants.

This right-winger resigned his bank position but his anti-Turkish, anti-Muslim views and book are popular in Germany, which is the country that helped accelerate modern racism under Hitler and his crew -– and where German Jewish scholar Magnus Hirschfeld actually coined the modern term “racism” for the anti-Semitic oppression of his day (the 1930s).

According to the French press story,

“Multikulti”, the concept that “we are now living side by side and are happy about it,” does not work, Merkel told a meeting of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party at Potsdam near Berlin.

So the concept of multicultural pluralism is under even more open pressure from those who want more aggressive one-way assimilation to white-Christian-centrism in Germany. The contradictions in Merkel’s view are also clear in this article:

While warning against “immigration that weighs down on our social system”, Merkel said Germany needed specialists from overseas to keep the pace of its economic development.

Apparently, many German leaders are not aware that the mostly hardworking immigrants from Muslim countries are among the workers who can help bail out Germany from its falling and aging population problems over the next few decades.