It’s what happens when too many people go bananas

Twenty-five years ago, when the Berlin Wall opened – I spent a week there watching the celebrations.

People standing on the wall, chipping off pieces of cement as souvenirs. I met Birgitte who had just come from East Germany and was close to tears.

“I’ve been to the wall and saw the people. It was crazy. It was wonderful for me,” said Birgitte.

A lot of us remember that part, but I discovered something else that week in 1989: an immigration debate, a fear of cheap labor.

“They’re already putting up ads for East students who want to work here on the weekends. So they can come over here and work two, three hours and get a month’s rent. I have people coming over to my place saying, ‘I’ll be your cleaning lady. I’ll work very cheap,'” said a business owner I met near the old Reichstag building.

“We call it almost a plague right now because they call them (locusts). A joke is going around because there is no banana left in West Berlin,” said the business owner.

As I walked the streets with my translator, we started seeing banana graffiti stenciled on buildings.

My translator explained, “There is this one joke, ‘How do you use a banana for a compass? You put it on the Berlin Wall and the side which is bitten is the East.”

The fear of cheap labor, the disruption to the status quo – people everywhere mistrust large numbers of strangers.

It’s not just about race or language.

The people flooding into West Berlin 25 years ago were the same race, spoke the same language, shared the same culture and still there was resentment.

Which may help explain why our immigration debate is so difficult.