It takes patience and a good dose of composure, energy and, above all, openness to the constant change in urban society.
One example is multilingualism. According to integration monitoring, two thirds of the population consider it necessary to promote this as a “resource” in schools and daycare centers. The fact that 93 percent of young people in Vienna who speak to their parents in their native language at home speak German in everyday life and with their friends shows how much the call for German in the schoolyard, which is popular in this country, is covered by layers of dust. German is “highly relevant” for integration and participation, the authors write. At the same time, many authorities use imagery or multilingual forms to “signal a welcome” and lower hurdles, not only when dealing with refugees and not only when specifically dealing with immigration law issues.
It’s also no small feat: Since 2015, the city has organized the “Children’s Library of World Languages”, which has a total of around 13,900 media in over 50 languages. German and English are a given in the 38 municipal libraries. 25 even offer media, language learning materials and books in Ukrainian and Russian, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, French, Hebrew, Italian or Turkish – for refugees to use free of charge.
Everyone is allowed to work
Experiences with immigration from all over the world have been collected in Vienna for centuries. As early as the High Middle Ages, there was documented evidence of the recruitment of guest workers, for example in the form of craftsmen and tradesmen, including from Flanders. Bavaria was successful in the construction industry, the Habsburgs needed staff in the residential city, many beggars came from southern Germany, wholesalers, Greeks, Armenians, Calvinists and Jews, and later celebrities who were difficult to integrate, such as the extremely busy Bonn resident Ludwig van Beethoven with his over 50 residences in the city, which at the time had a quarter of a million inhabitants.
As a result of industrialization, the labor market was completely liberalized in the mid-19th century. The exploitation of the newly emerging precariat from Bohemia and Moravia in the brickworks for the magnificent bourgeois and aristocratic buildings in classicism was the motivation for dissidents to come together to form the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. The mass exodus from the collapsed empire after the loss of the First World War led to the housing construction offensive in red Vienna, which is still exemplary today.
2024-01-10 00:19:55
#Migration #policy #Vienna
