In his fellowship, Daniel Thym examines Germany’s self-image as a country of immigration. On the one hand, he deals with the specifics of the German immigration debate and relates it to experiences of classic immigration countries such as the USA. In addition, Thym looks at legal foundations that regulate access to German territory, e.g., via skilled labor or refugee immigration, and discusses their influence on Germany’s self-image as an immigration country. A third focus of his project deals with the debate about self-image per se, which has long since ceased to refer to immigration in the narrower sense but to questions of social cohesion as a whole.
Prof. Dr. Daniel Thym studied law in Regensburg, Paris and at the Humboldt University in Berlin and completed a master’s degree in London. In October 2010, Thym took over the Chair of Public Law, European and International Law at the University of Konstanz and has since been co-director of the Research Center for Foreigners and Asylum Law there. His research focuses on German, European and international migration law, as well as EU constitutional development with an emphasis on human rights and foreign policy. Daniel Thym regularly comments on current issues in the media, and as an expert in the Bundestag’s Committee on Internal Affairs. From 2020 to 2022, he was Deputy Chairman of the Expert Council on Integration and Migration (member since 2016), and from 2019 to 2021 he participated in the Federal Government’s Expert Commission on Framework Conditions for Integration Capability. Currently, Thym is Chairman of the Advisory Board for Research Migration at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees and a member of the Advisory Board of the Research Center there.