Volker Beck, Member of German Greens Party (4th from left) at a demonstration in June, 2015 | Clemens Bilan/Getty Images Germans should learn Arabic, says Green MP Volker Beck also said Germans shouldn’t worry about migrants speaking their own language.

BERLIN — German lawmakers have slammed the Green party's migration spokesman for saying that Germans who feel insecure in their neighborhood should learn Arabic or Turkish to fit in.

Volker Beck, the Green party's spokesman on migration issues, told the broadcaster n-tv on Friday that Germans shouldn't be worried about neighborhoods where people speak different languages. "Other countries are more relaxed about the fact that in some areas a community with a migration background speaks another language," Beck said, citing Mexican and Chinese communities in the U.S.

"It creates a discomfort, because people have the feeling that they don't understand everything. But if it's really important to people, they should learn the language, then they would understand what's going on," he said.

Beck's comments were criticized by center-right politicians who said it could undermine integration efforts.

Christina Schwarzer, a Christian Democrat MP in Neukölln, an area of Berlin that's home to a large number of migrants, told newspaper Bild "then we can give up on any effort to integrate [migrants]."

"Learning German is the cornerstone of integration," she said.

Bild also quoted unnamed sources in the Green party who were dismissive of Beck's comments. "The duty of politicians should rather be to think about ways to teach German quickly to newcomers," they said.

But Beck said his comments had been twisted.

"People who want to live in Germany have to learn, understand and speak German," he wrote in a Facebook post.

However, he said the situation was different for "policemen and social workers."

Beck is a former Green internal affairs spokesman. He resigned from that post after being caught in possession of crystal meth.