Germany Keeps Enticing Migrants with Welfare Benefits

Friedrich Merz knows how important uncontrolled mass migration was at the last election, so has promised to crackdown on the vast pull factors encouraging people to move to Germany.

Yet much like his pledge to get a grip of illegal migration, this alleged crackdown appears to consist far more of rhetoric than of action.

As such, Germany’s Federal Employment Agency is actively promoting Bürgergeld—the citizens’ benefit paid to those with no income or who do not earn enough money to support themselves—to young migrants.

A page on its website is written in English “for people from abroad,” and leads with an image of a happy young couple. Those with “little or no knowledge of German” are also encouraged to make an appointment for taxpayer funding.

A fairly basic criteria has been established for the payments, namely:

• You or members of your community are in need of assistance.
• You are capable of working at least three hours a day.
• You are at least 15 years old and have not yet reached the age limit for your pension.
• You live in Germany and have the centre of life here.

Mocking the scheme in Focus, journalist Jan Fleischhauer described Germany as “so generous that it not only explains to immigrants from abroad how to get a job, but also how to make ends meet in Germany without one.”

To prevent anyone from getting the false idea that citizens’ income is only for people too old or too sick to work, a young couple beams at you from the side, looking as if they’d easily find employment. On the left, a young man in his early thirties holds a green-bound book; next to him, a young woman in a hijab who also doesn’t look stupid.

AfD co-chair Alice Weidel added online that people abroad are being “actively encouraged to immigrate into our social system.”

Particular anger was prompted earlier this month when members of an Afghan family receiving close to €7,000 in citizens’ benefit payments were revealed to be showing off their wealth on social media.