Germany is a country with long and rich immigration and emigration history. Migrations were always essential regulation factors of economic, social, cultural and political development of Germany in Europe and the world. This story cannot be reduced to the contemporary history or even only to the topical debates on the integration of immigrants. Migration occurred by the centuries. She stamped all epochs of German, European and global history, even if in different magnitude in one or other form.
Today Germany and Europe are not any more – if they were it ever – those Western-Christian societies with an ever nationwide homogeneous cultural canon in which "the other is the stranger". Today the variety is the typical sign of the German ones and the European societies – migration has led to new societies. Societies which become even more coloured and more varied in future. This social variety finds her correspondence in the variety of history – the heir of the immigration society. However, up to now the rich migration-historical inheritance and the social variety are neither thematic nor institutionally appropriately shown but absent as a part of the new history in Germany and Europe.
Germany can boast in this area at the moment only of one weak institutional scenery: A permanently secure institution which fulfils the job to document the variety of the migration history, to preserve it and to make it publicly visible and accessible nowhere exists currently. So that the migration history receives an adequate place in the collective memory of the society and is delivered not only fragment-like " or even gets lost –, it requires the creation of professional institutions and structures for the protection of this history. Hence, DOMiD works together with other private and state actors to set up in the medium term a migration museum " centre for history, art and culture of the migration with archive, library, long-term exhibition, working rooms and event rooms.
"Ein Migrationsmuseum ist kein ritueller Ort kultureller Erinnerung, vielmehr dekonstruiert es historische Selbstvergewisserungen, die überwiegend national orientiert sind. Es macht gesellschaftliche Veränderungsprozesse sichtbar und weist zugleich über das Bestehende hinaus."
(Aytaç Eryılmaz and Martin Rapp, in: Projekt Migration, Cologne 2005, p. 584 f.)