Daimler Chair Says Immigration Necessary for Germany’s Future
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Transcripts, audio, video on the web: http://www.brusselsforum.org
Daimler Chair Says Immigration Necessary for Germany’s Future
~ U.S. Senator Says Immigration Hurts Wages ~
BRUSSELS (March 21, 2015) – On the second day of the 10th Brussels Forum, Dieter Zetsche, chairman of the board of management of Daimler AG, said that Germany can only remain competitive economically if it does not close its workforce to immigrants. “Germany basically has no future without immigration,” he said. “It’s absolutely of existential relevance for us.”
“It’s in our best interest to have people coming into our country and to Europe all together,” he continued. “Thinking that as white and in many cases male Germans or Europeans we can go for the strongest future is entirely wrong.”
Zetsche spoke at Brussels Forum, an annual conference on transatlantic relations organized by The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) and attended by heads of state, officials from the EU institutions and member states, U.S. officials, congressional representatives, parliamentarians, and academics.
U.S. Republican Senator Jeff Sessions disagreed about the economic benefits of immigration saying that it was not a source of strength for the United States. “Immigration pulls down wages,” he said. Speaking specifically of a recent bill before Congress, he explained, “the Congressional Budget Office scored the comprehensive immigration bill that failed as pulling down wages and increasing unemployment. How could it not?”
In response to an audience question on Iran’s nuclear program, Sessions said that Congress was compelled to act in light of ongoing negotiations. “The United States Congress feels like it should be a partner in the Israeli-Iranian negotiations, and the president is talking about not only signing an agreement but now they’re talking about going to the UN and trying to ratify it to give it some sort of a permanence,” he said. “Congress was being pushed beyond what we’ve seen in the past.”
U.S. Republican Representative Darryl Issa, in the audience, agreed with Sessions, saying that Congress had to act to preserve the balance of powers between the branches of the U.S. government.
The final panel discussion of the afternoon covered strategic competition in Asia. During this session, former Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said that Europe is slowly coming to the realization that Asia has global strategic importance. “It has dawned upon Europe that there is a need to develop a somewhat more strategic approach,” he said. “The problem, of course, of Europe is that at the moment we have a slight bandwidth problem in the sense that all of our neighborhood is going up in flames. That tends to consume a lot of the political energy.”
The same panel included a conversation about the balance of power within Asia. Cui Liru, a senior advisor at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, said that nationalism is playing an important role in Asian regional politics, citing examples of high-level Japanese government officials’ visits to the controversial Yasukuni war shrine and the ongoing dispute over the Diayou/Senkaku islands.
Yoriko Kawaguchi, a professor at Meiji Institute for Global Affairs and a former Japanese foreign minister, said that on the contrary, Japan has been a responsible member of the international community for decades. “Japan has worked for the past 70 years for peace and for regional development and we are proud we did it,” she said. “China does not recognize it.”
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Brussels Forum is an annual high-level meeting of the most influential U.S., European, and global political, corporate, and intellectual leaders to address pressing challenges currently facing both sides of the Atlantic. With over 50 countries represented and more than 400 attendees, the 10th annual Brussels Forum include heads of state, senior officials from the European Union institutions and the member states, U.S. government officials and Congressional representatives, parliamentarians, academics, and media. For the 10th annual Brussels Forum, GMF is honored to feature four co-chairs who provide support and intellectual leadership to the discussions: Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, counselor and trustee, Center for Strategic & International Studies; Frank Friedman, CEO, Deloitte LLP; Herman van Rompuy, former president of the European Council; and Dr. Dieter Zetsche, chairman of the board of management, Daimler AG. GMF is joined in this initiative by our founding partners Daimler and the Federal Authorities of Belgium. We are also pleased to welcome Deloitte as a strategic partner, and BP, Chevron, The OCP Policy Center, and UPS as forum partners. In addition, we would like to recognize the support of our associate partners: the Asan Institute, Bank of America, Brussels Capitol Region, the Latvian Ministry of Defence, NATO, and the Wilfried Martens Centre. Finally, we appreciate the backing of our dinner program partners, AT&T, IBM, and Solvay. We thank Lufthansa Airlines Group as the official airline partner for Brussels Forum and recognize SpotMe as the creator of the official Brussels Forum app, BFconnect.
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