BERLIN: The elder statesman of the European left, the former chancellor Helmut Schmidt, on Thursday poured petrol on the flames of Germany’s impassioned immigration debate when he declared that there were far too many foreigners in his country and that they could not be assimilated because his compatriots were “racist deep down”.

They had let themselves get “stuck with” a multicultural society because of their feelings of guilt over Hitler and the Nazis, he said.

Mr Schmidt’s extraordinary comments were published as Germany’s president, Johannes Rau, was agonising about whether to sign into law an immigration bill passed last week amid uproar in parliament. Race is now set to be a central issue in the forthcoming general election contest between chancellor Gerhard Schroder and his challenger from the hard right, Edmund Stoiber.

Mr Stoiber appealed to his followers to move beyond the heated debate over the constitutionality of the new law and concentrate on what he called the nub of the matter. In characteristically inflammatory style, he defined this as “how much and what sort of immigration Germany can put up with”.

As Mr Schmidt showed, though, it is not only mainstream conservative politicians in Germany who use language when discussing race that elsewhere in Europe would prompt uproar, if not legal action. In a book to be published on Monday, Mr Schmidt, the Social Democrat chancellor from 1974 to 1982, says: “For idealistic motives, born of the experience of the Third Reich, we have taken in far too many foreigners”.

Non-Germans account for just under 10 per cent of the population in Germany. But the reason the proportion is so high is that immigrants have not been granted the same citizenship rights as in countries such as Britain and France.

Overall, the number of immigrants and people from families of immigrant origin is lower in Germany than in either Britain or France.

Mr Schmidt, 82, writes: “We have seven million foreigners today who are not integrated and the minimal number who do want to integrate are not given help to do so”.

The Schroder government’s immigration bill makes a first effort to address integration. It provides for classes to be given to immigrants on German language, culture and society that will be compulsory for residents of long standing who have failed to achieve a certain level of fluency.

Mr Schmidt says in his book: “There are two possibilities for a foreigner. Either he is a guest in another country or he wants to immigrate. In the latter instance, he must slowly but surely - and it is a difficult process - identify with his new fatherland and become a citizen. If he is a guest, he has a quite different status. Then he has neither the right to vote nor a claim to sickness benefit, health services and unemployment pay. This distinction has been lost”.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.