Junior Professor of History and Migration Studies at the University of Osnabrück Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS). His current research focuses on East-West migrations past and present, and on the history of free movement. His book The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany will be published by Indiana University Press in October 2019.
War polarizes debate. And the sympathies of post-Soviet migrants living in Central Europe have come under extra scrutiny since war broke out in Ukraine. A closer look at the immigrant demographic in Germany reveals a more complicated picture of suspected Russophilia.
Attitudes towards immigration are said to be split down an East–West divide, but it is western Europe that has traditionally feared ‘invasions’ from the East and that responded to EU enlargement in 2004 with restrictions on labour migration. Now that eastern and western Europe are more deeply integrated than ever before, the defining question will be how Europe negotiates immigration from outside its borders.