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Abstract

There is widespread agreement among scholars that the 1990s and 2000s wit-
nessed a re-orientation of immigrant policies across western European
countries. According to the literature, this re-orientation featured a new and
strong focus on encouraging the adjustment of immigrants to the mainstream
cultures and political norms of receiving societies. Our article looks back on
the developments in Germany since the mid-1990s to examine these assumptions.
We maintain that immigrant and immigration policy has shifted since the 1990s
but that this shift is not as clear cut as many academic discussions would suggest.
While there were good reasons to diagnose a (re) turn to assimilationism in the
first half of the 2000s, we overestimated the strength and persistence of such
trends. We draw on Rogers Brubaker’s terminology in referring to current pol-
icies as a ‘new differentialism’. The new differentialism represents a novel trend
in policy, reflective of broader societal transformations. These developments
may complicate the place of the ‘German case’ in cross-national research – it
has outgrown its status as Europe’s maligned ethno-exclusionary pariah and
does not easily conform to models focusing on the departure from, or transform-
ation of, multiculturalism.