Many Guest Workers Become Guest Entrepreneurs
许多外籍劳工成为外籍企业家
To the consternation of Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, much of the couple’s coverage in the German press focused on their Turkish roots. “Our world can be saved. From Mainz. By children of migrants,” was a headline in Bild, Germany’s best-selling tabloid. Their story certainly defies the cliche of owners of doner-kebab stands and fruit-and-vegetable shops – even if Mr Sahin and Ms Tureci, chief executive and chief medical officer, respectively, of BioNTech, would have preferred to read about the details of their firm’s discovery, in partnership with Pfizer, an American drugmaker, of a highly effective vaccine against covid-19.
令乌古尔·萨欣和奥然姆·特雷西这对夫妇惊愕的是，德国媒体对他们的报道大多集中在他们的土耳其血统上。“我们的世界是可以由来自美因茨的移民后代拯救的。”这是德国最畅销小报《图片报》的新闻头条。两夫妻的故事经历无疑与旋转烧烤摊摊主和水果蔬菜店老板的陈词滥调相悖——即使BioNTech制药公司的首席执行官萨欣先生和首席医疗官特雷西女士都更愿意阅读自己的公司与美国制药商辉瑞公司合作研发新冠肺炎高效疫苗的细节。
“There are other BioNTechs,” says Rosemarie Kay of the IfM, a think-tank in Bonn. Migrants are much likelier than the average German to start a business. According to a recent survey by KFW, a state-owned development bank, one in four of the 605,000 founders of firms last year had foreign origins. They are not limited to groceries and gastronomy. Spotted, established by Nik Myftari, a refugee from Kosovo, is a dating website. Novum, created in 1988 by Nader Etmenan, who fled Iran, has become one of Germany’s biggest chains of hotels.
波恩市智库IfM的罗斯玛丽·凯表示：“BioNTechs公司的情况不是个例。”移民比普通德国人创业的可能性要高得多。根据国有开发银行德国复兴信贷银行（KFW）最近一项调查显示，去年的60.5万名公司创业者中有四分之一拥有外国血统。他们不拘泥于食品杂货和美食行业。科索沃难民尼克·梅夫塔里创建了一家名为Spotted的约会网站。逃离伊朗的纳德尔·埃特梅南于1988年创立了诺富姆酒店，该酒店现已成为德国最大的连锁酒店之一。
Immigrants to Germany (like Mr Sahin) or those with at least one parent who was born abroad (like Ms Türeci) number 19.6m, representing 24% of the population. A study from the Bertelsmann Foundation, another think-tank, found that members of this group own 773,000 businesses. Of these, 469,000 are sole traders. The rest are employers, mostly in construction, retail and services. Their numbers are growing. By comparison, the number of other Germans who own businesses declined by 275,000 in the period, to 3.2m.
到德国的移民（如萨欣先生）或父母至少有一方在国外出生的人（如特雷西女士）总计有1960万人，相当于德国人口的24%。据另一家智库贝塔斯曼基金会的一项研究发现，这一群体成员拥有77.3万家企业。其中有46.9万家是个体户。其余的则是雇主，主要从事建筑业、零售业和服务业。而且此类企业数量还在增长。相比之下，由德国人拥有的企业数量在这一时期减少了27.5万，降至320万家。
“Germans are averse to self-employment,” says Armando Garcia-Schmidt of the Bertelsmann Foundation. Many graduates prefer a safe civil-service career to the vicissitudes of starting a business. The booming labour market of the past decade helped skilled and unskilled youngsters land a decent job without trying.
贝塔斯曼基金会的阿曼多·加西亚·施密特表示：“德国人不喜欢自主创业。”许多德国毕业生宁愿有一个安稳的公务员职业，也不愿经历创业的沧桑。过去十年蓬勃发展的劳动力市场帮助那些有技能和无技能的年轻人不费吹灰之力就找到了体面的工作。
Options for migrants tend to be more limited. Some come from countries with strong entrepreneurial traditions and tend to pick successful entrepreneurs as role models. Various studies show that explicit or implicit discrimination makes the labour market, even in good times, much tougher for migrants. And many have qualifications from their country of origin that are not recognised in Germany, so creating a business is their only chance to earn more than the wage from a menial job.
移民的就业选择往往更加有限。有些移民来自具有很强创业传统的国家，他们往往会选择成功的企业家作为榜样。各种研究表明，即使在经济繁荣时期，劳动力市场存在的显性或隐性歧视使得移民求职更加艰难。许多移民在自己本国家获得的学历在德国不受认可，因此，创业是他们唯一能够拥有比干粗活更多收入的机会。
Mr Garcia-Schmidt expects the labour market to become more difficult for everyone once the pandemic has abated and Germany’s generous furlough schemes expire. Covid-19 has made 2020 a terrible year for founders of all stripes. As the country emerges from the coronavirus recession, more native Germans may opt for self-employment as an alternative to joblessness. They can learn a thing or two from their migrant neighbours.
加西亚·施密特先生预计，一旦新冠疫情消退，德国慷慨的休假计划到期，届时对每个人而言，劳动力市场都会雪上加霜。对于各行各业的公司创始人来说，新冠肺炎使2020年成为可怕的一年。随着德国从减弱的冠状病毒中复苏，更多的德国本土人可能会选择自主创业以代替失业。这些德国本地人可以从他们的移民邻居那里学到一些东西。
英文、中文版本下载：http://www.yingyushijie.com/shop/source/detail/id/2563.html