The KUhn Memorandum" on education as the most important means of integration of foreigners and their families into German society

The article aims to analyze the memorandum on the "situation and further development of the integration of immigrant workers and their families in the Federal Republic of Germany", issued by Heinz Kuhn, the first commissioner of the newly established German Federal Office for Foreigners, in 1979. The article contains a detailed analysis of the points of the memorandum relating to the field of education. Kuhn's vision of the problems in education, preventing the integration of immigrants and his suggestions for improvement of the educational process in order to achieve successful integration of immigrant children are presented in this article. The 1950s - the beginning of the 1970s was the period of mass labor immigration to Germany. Then West Germany opened its doors for labor migrants from Italy, Portugal, Greece, Yugoslavia and later Turkey. One of those who first recognized the need for the integration of foreigners, who the country with a very low rate of the indigenous population growth could not virtually do without, was a member of the SPD Heinz Kuhn (1912-1992). The Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1966-1978, in November 1978 he headed the Federal Office for Foreigners, and in September 1979 he released his almost seventy-page report on the "situation and further development of the integration of immigrant workers and their families in the Federal Republic of Germany", better known as The Kuhn Memorandum. Heinz Kuhn proceeded from the fact that mass immigration was an inevitable process for Germany. At the same time, he drew attention to the negative consequences of the massive influx of immigrants, suggesting a number of practical measures to ease and prevent these negative consequences in the future. At the beginning of his memorandum, Kuhn pointed out the following priorities to focus on in order to conduct a coherent policy on the integration of foreigners into the German society: 1) to recognize the de facto immigration; 2) to significantly intensify integration measures, especially for juveniles in pre-school, school and vocational education; 3) to cease segregation in education; 4) to recognize the right of foreign youth to unhindered access to jobs and places in educational institutions; 5) to recognize the right of naturalization for those foreigners who were born and raised in Germany; 6) to review immigration laws and the process of naturalization; 7) to grant foreigners living in Germany for a long time political rights, for example, to vote in regional elections. Unfortunately, despite the approval of the memorandum from public and charitable organizations, Kuhn's proposals did not find any real support either in society or in the federal government. Among the reasons for this, in the author's opinion, were two main ones: firstly, a huge cost of implementing of Kuhn's proposals (about 600 million DM annually). Secondly, the German government and society as a whole held the opinion that foreign workers were gas-tarbeiters (literally: guest-workers), who sooner or later would be asked to return to their homeland.

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