FES-Information-Series 2008-04 Immigration into a Non-immigration Country: The German Experience Holger Kolb ∗ Summary: Although empirically being a country of immigration right from the beginning, Germany for a long time had difficulties to accept immigration and integration as vital features of its history. This contribution aims at uncovering and explaining the complex divergence between empirical reality and self-description and argues that the roots of this gap are to be found in the German history of being an incomplete nation-state for a long time. As a consequence of the German partition and the emergence of large Diasporas in the East of Europe, Germany for a long time could not finally finish its nation-building project and thus was obliged to renounce the immigration and integration reality. The German reunification in 1990 und as a corollary the finalisation of the German nation-building project ended this period of self­renunciation. Consequently, normalisation processes started right after the finalisation of the nation-building process in the various realms of society. Two of these normalisation processes, politics and law, are explained in more detail. If somebody would be asked to summarise the relationship between Germany and immigration with one word, he/she probably best would use one word:“ambivalent”. The ambivalent relationship between Germany and its immigration experience can be best summarised with the sentence:“Germany is not a country of immigration.” This formula is the centre point of the stubborn self-denial of Germany, a country which Dietrich Thränhardt ∗ Holger Kolb, Dr. phil, M.A. is a lecturer at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies of the University of Osnabrück. In 2008 he is post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Political Science of the University of Münster. His most recent contribution is(ed. with Henrik Egbert) Migrants and Markets, Perspectives from Economics and the Other Social Sciences, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2008.