Letters from Germany
According to the recently-released figures of the national German Labour Agency (Arbeitsagentur), the budget gap for welfare expenses will increase to 18 billion Euros in 2010, and another 11 billion in 2011. Frank Jurgen Weise, chief bureaucrat of the Nurnberg-based state institution, called on the government to raise the contribution rate to the unemployment insurance from 2.8 percent to 4 percent. Some hundred kilometres northward, Mahmut Erden, a Turkish-originated lawyer from Hamburg, reports on the increasing number of immigrants being deported from Germany due to long-term unemployment and dependence on the countries well-developed welfare system. The demographic change of Germany’s aging population puts more pressure on immigrants to find jobs and pay taxes to the public budget.
I have been living in Munich, the magnificent capital of Bavaria, since 2004. My barber at Goethe Strasse, a street in the city centre inhabited mainly by immigrants and full of Arab and Turkish grocery shops, told me recently that his dream of Germany was never fulfilled since he moved to town as an “import-groom” from central Anatolia a few years ago. A close relative, who has been living in Germany since the late 1960`s, had told him that the welfare system would take care of anyone who was unemployed. He described Germany as a “paradise where money grows on trees and jobs are available at anytime”. This metaphoric description would have been suitable some ten, fifteen or twenty years ago, but not in 2009. My barber has been looking for a well-paid job in a factory or at the municipality for months, but the economic crisis has affected labour markets negatively. Not much has been left of the German “Wirtschaftswunder” (Economic Miracle) of the 1950`s and 60`s. There is a significant lack of high-skilled and tax-paying labour force nowadays. The Christian-Liberal government under Chancellor Angela Merkel has taken steps to recognize more than 500,000 foreign diplomas and qualifications. At the same time, university graduates from non-EU countries are granted a one-year resident permit to find a job. But if they do not, their visas will not be extended. Authorities want to hinder them from benefiting from public money.
The German welfare system, developed by Otto von Bismarck, a well-known and charismatic chancellor of the German Reich in the 19th century, is still one of most comprehensive and generous among industrialized countries. It combines a vigorous and highly competitive capitalist economy with social services that, with some exceptions, provide citizens cradle-to-grave security. But the latest report of the Federal Commissioner for Migration, Refugees and Integration, Maria Bohmer (Christian Democratic Union), makes the picture clearer: the unemployment rate among immigrants (20.3 percent) was nearly twice the number of their “German” pendants (10.1 percent) in 2007; almost one third of Berlin’s Turkish immigrants benefit from welfare services covering unemployment payments, family allowances and cheap housing credits.
Immigrants, even high-skilled ones, who have been told paradise stories by their relatives in Europe, should not keep their expectations too high. Germany’s reality has changed significantly. Wolfgang Bosbach, a senior MP of the ruling CDU, called for harder sanctions and “painful” cuts of welfare payments for immigrants who do not complete German courses successfully and integrate into society. Tax-paying immigrants are most welcome guests, but those who do not are an unaffordable burden for the welfare system.
