While the latest economic projection figures indicate the German economy—by far Europe’s largest—will contract by 0.4% in 2023, Hamburg, one of Germany’s wealthiest cities, has once again increased its budget to accommodate the country’s state-dependent migrant population.
Days ago, the Budget Committee of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg—after already having upped the amount allocated for the reception of migrants by €118.7 million earlier this year—announced that it would again increase the sum by another €212.8 million, bringing the city-state’s government’s total expenditure for the accommodation of migrants so far in 2023 to around €1 billion, BILD reports.
However, if costs incurred by the state for migrant schooling, which the state says cannot be determined, along with healthcare and daycare costs, are included, the figure, according to reports, is said to greatly exceed the €1 billion mark.
Since 2015, a year that saw a record-setting 2.14 million migrants arrive in Germany, the local government in Hamburg has spent nearly half a billion euros providing medical care for migrants alone, according to a parliamentary inquiry from the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)’s parliamentary faction in Hamburg’s Landtag.
“This is a huge sum and puts our community of solidarity at risk,” Alexander Wolf, the migration policy spokesman for the AfD’s parliamentary faction in Hamburg, lamented.
“Migrants who are required to leave the country must be brought back to their homeland immediately, which will relieve the burden on our social security funds. And if the nanny state covers medical costs in abundance for all migrants, then he himself will soon be in a sick bed,” he added.
Quite notably, and likely at least in part because of the AfD’s continuous rise in the polls, politicians from Germany’s liberal Left have begun to express similar fears over the effect mass migration has on social cohesion.
Andres Dressel, an SPD politician who serves as a Finance Senator in Hamburg, is one of those politicians. In an appeal to the federal government for increased assistance to help deal with the continued influx of migrants, he said:
We were only able to provide reinforcements again through extreme effort. We didn’t have to make cuts elsewhere, but [we] were able to secure financing in 2023 with our own and federal funds. The next few years will not be possible without additional federal funding. The federal government must provide the states with more money for integration, not less, as previously planned. The traffic light [coalition] must understand that anything else would be poison for social cohesion.
Hamburg Senator Melanie Schlotzhauer (SPD) spoke similarly, warning: “There is no relief in sight, and our capacities are at 97 percent capacity. We are at the limit of what makes good integration possible in Hamburg. The admission numbers are too high; they have to go down.”
Over the past decade, especially in the past six or seven years, Germany’s financial resources have increasingly come under strain as a result of having taken in a massive number of migrants, most of whom are uneducated from alien cultures and have, as a consequence, remained unintegrated and dependent on the state.
On costs to integrate newcomers alone, Germany’s federal government spent nearly €22 billion, down slightly from the €22.5 billion that were spent on the same thing the year before, according to figures from the Federal Ministry of Finance. In 2020, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Finance, at the time headed by now-Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD), announced that it planned to allocate €64.5 billion for the integration of migrants and to tackle the root causes of migration abroad.
It is worth highlighting that some 900,000 migrants—nearly half of those who arrived in Germany during the European Migrant Crisis of 2015-16—still live on social welfare benefits, as The European Conservative has previously reported.
