Your statement about Lafontaine's comments is a whitewash. Note that the 'foreigners', particularly those from Turkey (first thing that comes to mind in Germany when referring to foreign workers) are mostly people who have either been born in Germany or who have lived there for decades. In a normal country the vast majority of these 'foreigners' would long since be citizens. One major accomplishment of Red-Green has been the reform of the citizenship laws, however, it will take a long time for them to remedy the legacy of the old one. And Lafontaine seems to be more along the lines of the right than the left when he calls for stripping citizenship from foreigners deemed insufficiently assimilated.  He also is a big believer in racial homogeneity seeing the rise in non-white populations as a distinctly negative phenomenon, pointing Germans to the predicted non-white majority in the US as evidence for just how terrible immigration is.  As for not blaming immigrants - well the right also often says that it is understandable that poor people should want to work in wealthy Germany. And like Lafontaine, the neo-fascists of the NPD also see immigration as a conspiracy of the capitalist elites against the nation.  I have no idea what the hell happened to Lafontaine over the past several years but the results are ugly.  As a whole Lafontaine has clearly adopted the neo-fascist line on immigration. The only thing that makes the Linke better than the NPD in this regard is that most of its leaders fortunately don't share Lafontaine's beliefs.