Pakistani Migrants

President of Pak-German Council for Culture and Democracy participated as a main speaker in a seminar on "Cultural Diplomacy in East Asia: A Forum for Young Leaders" organized by the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy (ICD) on 7 October 2009 in Berlin. He talked about the Pakistani diaspora in Europe and Germany and discussed the issues of Brain Drain and Brain Gain.

Shahid Riaz said that Muslims are facing more difficulties in integrating into German society than other ethnic communities. Since religion plays a central role in the lives of Muslims, therefore they are very attached with their own communities. Likewise other communities their own culture and language plays a very important role in their lives as well, you can see that Pakistanis mostly go to Pakistani mosques so do the Bangladeshis. The problem is that Germans do not have a very good understanding of Islam, they do fear from Muslims after the 09/11 attacks. Most of the Germans have never been into a mosque and they don’t even know how a mosque looks like from inside.

He emphasized his optimism about the future of the Asian diaspora in Europe, for example if you look 20 to 30 years back, Greeks, Spanish, Portuguese and Italians were also facing integration problems in Germany but today no one talks about them because Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy came into EU and their economies improved. Therefore, Shahid Riaz predicted as the Asian countries are making economical progress the status of the Asian immigrants in EU will improve as well.

He also stated that besides the cultural identity immigrants do have economical identities, just for example, if someone comes here from Malawi, he will be treated differently than someone coming from the USA even with the same religion and appearance - and similarly an immigrant restaurant worker will be seen differently from an immigrant investor or a popular actor. German laws have been improved over the years in the favour of immigrants, it gives Shahid Riaz hope that the life of immigrants in Germany will become easier rather than difficult. But one should be very clear that there will be no ideal situation for the immigrants in EU.