The 50s and 60s were the prime time of labour migration to Western Europe. In the post-war booms the economies needed workers and the countries were thus willing to let migrants enter. Today the situation has changed with governments developing ever more sophisticated measures to keep immigrants out. Nonetheless the size of the ethnic minorities in Western European countries is growing, not so much by further entry from abroad but rather by birth. The labour migrants have settled down permanently in their host countries and the second and third generation is growing up. This poses quite new questions not only to their parents but also to the host societies, politicians and researchers. There is a growing realisation today that those members of the ethnic minorities who have been brought up in the host countries have quite different relationships, compared to their parents, both to the countries of origin and of residence; the feeling of belonging has for them another dimension. This issue is not only of interest to themselves, but must also be of interest to the country of residence as the second and following generations are there to stay.
The official sign of belonging to a country is citizenship. Being the citizen of a state means being part of it, sharing in rights and obligations and being able to participate in the formation and running of public institutions. In order to analyse the feeling of belonging of the second generation migrants towards their country of residence, it is thus a first step to look at the manner in which citizenship influences their identity. Given the diversity of citizenship regulations and the characteristics of ethnic minorities it is impossible to tackle this question in a purely abstract and general way. A more rewarding approach is to look at two case studies which differ in the granting of citizenship to ethnic minorities and to attempt from this the formulation of tentative conclusions about the effect of citizenship on identity formation among second generation migrants.
The two ideal types of citizenship acquisition at birth are either ius sanguinis, i.e. acquisition on the basis of descent, or ius soli, i.e. acquisition on the basis of place of birth. Nowhere do these ideal types exist in all their purity, one can, however, find countries which adhere to them quite closely. In Western Europe Great Britain's laws are based on the principle of ius soli, while those of Germany are based on ius sanguinis. As both countries have, furthermore, experienced considerable labour migration in the post-war era and thus now have to deal with similar phenomena as a consequence, this dissertation will focus on the situation in these two states. If one wanted to look at the major ethnic minority communities these would be the South Asians in Britain and the Turks in Germany. Comparing, however, not only two different countries of residence but also two different areas of origin will complicate the picture unnecessarily and will make it nearly impossible to separate cultural and legal factors. Accordingly the communities analysed in this dissertation will be the South Asians in both Germany and Britain, although these exhibit rather different migration histories and degrees of social integration, as will be seen later.
As in Great Britain most of the second generation South Asians are born into British citizenship, citizenship is not much of a topic in that country and the most pressing questions centre on other aspects of identity and feeling of belonging. On these there is some literature, on which the analysis of this dissertation will be based. In Germany, on the other hand, citizenship has become recently a major issue, not only in public debates. Nonetheless, the German literature like the British focuses primarily on other factors determining identities, furthermore it deals mainly with second generation Turks and other Gastarbeiter (guest workers). It was thus not possible to found this work solely on literature analysis. More basic research was needed, thus for a sensible comparison more space had to be allocated to the description of the German than the British situation, and original fieldwork research had to be conducted to throw light on the situation of Indo-Germans.
The comparison of the situation of second generation South Asians in Germany and Britain highlights the different importance citizenship acquires in both countries. It shows how growing up with a foreign citizenship and thus being defined as foreigner by the state and its institutions has an impact on the self-definition. Thus the symbolic links to the country of origin of the parents are strengthened and the second generation foreigners distance themselves from their country of residence, which can result finally in an alienation from the state. This does not imply that all is well where ius soli guarantees automatic acquisition of the citizenship of the place of residence, but shows that ius sanguinis unnecessarily complicates matters further.