Idle by Law.(war refugees barred from labor force, Germany)(Brief Article)

Things are looking a lot better for Imer Duraku now than when he was fleeing war-torn Kosovo eight years ago. Granted a haven in Germany, the 41-year-old attorney and his family just moved into a comfortable, three-bedroom apartment in Bernau, a leafy suburb north of Berlin. Today his six children--the youngest born in Berlin--speak perfect German, have many German friends, and their bombed-out homeland is no more than a remote memory. They would be an upwardly mobile immigrant family with a bright future, if it were allowed.

Germany does not allow it. The government keeps tens of thousands of war refugees like Duraku barred from the labor market--even if they have been here for years, bring needed skills and have already assimilated into society. So even though he has learned German, taken a computer course and found an employer who wants him as a paralegal, the local labor office keeps saying nein. His children have stamps in their passports that say all work or education beyond high school is verboten. Next year his oldest daughter, Kosovare, would like to go to university, but will go on welfare instead. The German taxpayer pays the rent for the Durakus' apartment, and gives them 1,250 euro a month in food coupons and welfare payments. "There's nothing I'd like to do more than work," Duraku says. "Instead they're making me live like a beggar."

Though Europe's leading economy has long attracted migrants from around the world, a legacy of mistrusting foreigners keeps Germany from putting their skills to good use. Foreign engineering students get shipped home after they finish their studies in Germany. Even the millions of Turks, Greeks and Italians who came to Germany as badly needed Gastarbeiter--ostensibly temporary "guest workers"--in the '50s and '60s have only reluctantly been accepted in the Germans' midst. Fuzzy ideas of an ethnically pure Germany coupled with a jealous fear of low-wage labor have kept the borders shut, even as German businesses complain about a dire shortage of high-tech workers. "Our immigration restrictions have been a real brake on growth," says Stephan Pfisterer, spokesman for German IT-industry association Bitkom in Berlin.

It's the cold threat of economic loss that's ...