People seeking low-paid jobs in other nations are not guilty of exploitation of anyone; they are simply fulfilling a useful role in the nation that required their labour. Any nation that imports people and uses them as a source of cheap labour and then expels them whenever they become inconvenient is guilty of exploitation of those people; especially when many of them have been in the country for several decades without being offered citizenship.
The antithesis of your statement applies equally as well. The workers exploited a niche in the labour market on an opportunistic basis that exclusively fulfilled their individual needs. The communities wherein they lived and worked provided them with a higher standard of living, access to the social services and the other benefits that are offered.
They left their communities for a reason, further, those communities are in their present state/condition as a result of the cultural practices within that community. In this example, Germany does not have a singular competitive advantage over most of their neighbours in terms of location or natural resources... Their advantage that has kept them at the top of the global heap in many sectors is directly linked to the cultural norms associated with its citizens.
Forcing people desperate for work into some sort of legal limbo for decades is hardly conducive to helping them become a full part of the society to which they emmigrated. In fact there are hundreds of thousands of second and third generation migrants to Germany who have fully integrated in spite of legal restrictions imposed upon them. They speak German, read German, listen to Western music, and participate fully in many other aspects of German culture. To call multiculturalism in Germany a failure so far as these migrants are concerned is nonsense. They are German in every respect except their religion and physical appearance. If they build mosques so what? That hardly undermines mainstream German culture.
I believe, albeit from the outside looking in, that part of the beef is with the practice that these groups are importing the foundations of the previous existence (ie. Turkey) at the expense of the overall German culture... It's one thing to preserve, maintain, honour and respect your individual traditions (ie importing your own culture) but I'm guessing that it is in a manner that in itself, segregates them from the (German) community at large.
This is not assimilation on the part of the immigrant community its a quite specific and deliberate straddeling of the fence.
