by Julia Helbing

When thinking about international migration, it came into my mind that it is somehow connected to globalization and high-tech work.

There are inevitably many poor countries. But in these countries are a lot of high-skilled workers. Because they don’t have the chance to get a proper education or a job in their country of origin, many of these workers go abroad, where they can find proper education and work. But still they take parts of their old life with them; they still want to eat food from their country of origin. So they import it from their home. Some people even opened shops just for the needs of foreign habitants, mostly foreigners, and imported the food they are used from home. As soon as normal supermarkets noticed this, they also started to offer some food from foreign countries, hoping that the immigrants would buy at their supermarket and take some other items with them. I think this is one good reason, why trade with foreign countries started and influenced globalization.

Nowadays, international migration is an all-over-the-world topic. People are going almost everywhere, because they have family in other countries, they already found a job or where they hope to find a job in the future. Many students also go abroad, to add experience and a stay abroad to their life or to learn another language and become fluent in speaking it. If they would find a job, they would also stay in this country and finish their studies there.

But going to a foreign country is really a very big step and should be considered well. When you start a new live in a country you don’t know, or you are not used to the habits, you will experience many difficulties not just concerning the language. In the other country, many things are different to the origin country, people behave different and react different. For example, whenever I go for shopping in Japan, whether it is food shopping or anything else, the employees behave different than German employees. Japanese employees seem to be friendlier, but they sometimes try to avoid speaking English with a foreign costumer. German employees seem to be a bit colder, but almost all of them can speak English or another language fluently. In Japan, you also take off your shoes when entering the fitting room, in Germany, you just keep them on.

International migrant also have strong ties to their home countries. They try to stick to their holidays, want to consume food and drinks from their own countries and they also like to speak their mother tongue at home. Of course they try to learn the language of the host country, but normally they speak it with an accent. When their children are growing, the children usually just use the mother tongue of their parents at home, but speak the host country’s language as soon as they exit the house. They find it less problematic to adapt to the behavior, language and costumes of the host country. The second or third generation of immigrants also loses the connection to their countries of origin more and more. The third or fourth generation can’t even speak the language of their grandparents anymore.

Nevertheless, immigrants have very often to fight against discrimination. Even if they can’t even speak the language of their country of origin, just because they look different, some people don’t see them as for example American habitants, despite they grew up and went to school in America. There are many laws against discrimination, but still a lot of discrimination happens, even in political environment. In Germany for example, one politician, Thilo Sarrazin wrote the book “Germany disestablishes itself” and stated that Muslims are taking away the jobs in Germany.

I think in a globalized world, there should be no space for discrimination. We can buy articles from all around the world through the internet or even in our local supermarket; a lot of foreign people are doing great jobs all over the world. And there are also some jobs that habitants born in one country don’t want to do, e.g. the care of elderly. They are happy that foreign people do this. You could say that some people don’t want to live with foreigners, but can’t live without them.