A Belgian physician named H. works at a health center. He has traveled to Iran twice and is a human rights activist while working in the health sector. Speaking to Iranian Kurdistan Human Rights Watch and considering the spread of Coronavirus in Iran and the efforts of Iranian doctors and nurses to contain the virus epidemic, he expressed surprise at the Iranians’ surprising unity against the virus spread called the Iranian doctors and specialists to return from European countries so as to serve their countrymen.
He has some interesting information on Iranian immigrants and the Western approach to Iranian immigrants. This conversation, which was sent to us by Dr. H. in the form of a note, is as follows:
Immigrant hell: Germany
Iranians in Germany In 2018, the federal statistical office (Destatis) of Germany estimated that around 237,000 with an iranian ethnical background live in Germany, and about 4,000 iranians currently study in the west-european country. A notably small percentage of these migrants are considered as refugees.
To state an example, Germany has an estimated shortage of 7000 doctors in 2020. Thus Germany is one of the european countries that keeps fishing the pond of highly qualified, well-educated iranians, offering them jobseeking-visas in an attempt to fill in shortages in its own jobmarket, causing shortages in Iran to grow by the outflow. These opportunities are mostly offered to medical specialists, engineers and other professionals that have rather rare specialisations. Many websites can be found that offer easy immigration procedures and attractive salaries and work conditions.
Growing racism in German society At the same time, racism in Germany is becoming more mainstream. According to research in Germany, there are almost 24,000 far-right extremists in the country with almost half being in favor of violence, the targets of far-right/racist murders are generally Muslims and the places where they live. When it is considered that German statistics show one in every five people see Muslims as enemies, it would not be wrong to argue that the far-right is getting stronger each and every day.
Moreover, these terrorists and their actions are sometimes assisted by government officials at various levels. The most concrete evidence of this is the lethargy shown by German authorities in investigating murders committed by the neo-nazi National Socialist Underground (NSU) terrorist organization between 2000 and 2007.
In these murders, 10 people lost their lives. According to remarks in the Federal Parliament by German Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht, who was newly appointed in June 2019, the NSU murders had not been revealed and were kept secret for years as judicial authorities suspected the victims’ families rather than uncovering the killers.
In the most recent act of racist terrorism, on Feb. 20, 2020, 11 people in their twenties and thirties, slme of them of kurdish origin, were killed in Hanau near the city of Frankfurt, Germany. The German perpetrator Tobias R., who allegedly killed himself and his mother in the immediate aftermath of the attack, was found to have contacted other far-rightists on issues of racism and conspiracy theories via the internet.
German politics and racism The increase in votes for far-right parties across Europe and the shift in this direction by right-wing conservative parties in the face of this increase played a very serious role in spreading the poison of racism. Actions such as demonstrations and meetings by the far-right Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA) movement and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party just before the Hanau massacre encouraged members of the far-right.
My request I strongly encourage Iranians thinking of immigration to Germany and other west-european countries to rethink their plans. Do we really want to serve a society polluted by racism and far right politics? Our government has spent a lot of resources so we could become as well-educated and highly qualified as we are today, and the people of our country need us.
