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Abstract
Population statistics is a governmental tool to describe the composition of people living on a given national territory. For this purpose different categories are employed. These categories shape the discourse about natio-ethnic-cultural “others” and thus implicitly “us.” This article explores the influence of international statistics with the notion of transnational interlacements in the development of a new classificatory system for the population in Germany in 2007. The center of this new taxonomy is the concept of “migration background.” Using a hermeneutic reading of public policy concentrating on the microcensus and the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) I show that the new categories are strongly interlaced with the international studies on students’ educational attainments and fuelled by academic discourse on a lack of visibility of certain population groups in official statistics. However, the transnational relation is not preventing a definition which is based on ethnic German descent. It excludes persons from the nation, marking them as natio-ethnic-cultural “others” through the category “persons with a migration background” even if they are born in Germany and have German citizenship.
Notes
1. All translations into English are by the author. I thank my copyreader Melisa Salazar for her excellent support. Furthermore I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their very helpful comments and suggestions.
2. For PISA every 4 years in all OECD member states and partner countries the skills in reading, mathematics and natural sciences of a sample of 15-year-old students are tested. The results are used to compare national educational systems regarding performance of students and their equal opportunities (see http://www.oecd.org/pisa/).
3. I will come back to this formally wrong opposition in the third part of this article, because it excludes half of the “persons with a migration background” who have the German citizenship. Surprisingly or not, one can also find this opposition in sources like the homepage of the Federal Statistical Office or in the first educational report.
4. The documentation on a specific household is kept for four years in the microcensus sample, which is why several questions are asked only once in four years.
5. Statement in an oral presentation at the conference “Vermessung der Einwanderungsgesellschaft” on 02.12.2015 (see https://www.bim.hu-berlin.de/media/Tagung_Vermessung_Ablaufplan_pdf.pdf).
6. It would be worthwhile to research why the concept "migration background" has finally achieved such a dominant position in the discourse, and not socioeconomic status which is strongly related to it. Empirical evidence shows that in most cases "migration background," irrespective of its operationalization, has no own explanatory power if socioeconomic status is considered (Gresch & Kristen, Citation2011 with references to others). But in the end “migration background” and not socioeconomic status became the new category in school statistics, even if it has not been used nation-wide until recently (Kemper, Citation2017).
7. In the 1990s the further development of naturalizations could not be monitored properly because the immigration of (Spät-)Aussiedler was automatically counted as a naturalization.
8. The term “late ethnic German resettlers” was invented by a law in 1992 and replaced the definition of “ethnic German resettler,” which had been established since 1950 (Worbs, Bund, Kohls, & Babka von Gostomski, Citation2013, pp. 21ff.).
9. This is roughly the rule. Of course, it is bound to several further preconditions which are not relevant for my argument here.
10. The wording is “Were you born in Germany (current territory of the Federal Republic Germany)?” Since this question has only been asked since 2005, the “current territory” refers to the territory after unification of the FRG and the GDR.