The German government pressing ahead with plans to spend nearly half a billion Euros to ‘create’ 100,000 heavily subsidised jobs for unemployed migrants.
Desperate to better integrate the millions of migrants that have already arrived, and continue to roll into Europe in droves through the migrant crisis, socialist workforce minister Andrea Nahles has been working on the plan since last year. But now the so-called refugee jobs have been criticised by economists who say paying companies €450,000,000 to employ migrants is nothing more than a short term fix.
The German government is presently negotiating over the 2017 budget, but politicians are already calling for significant extra funding to be found for migrants in 2016.
Instead of requiring migrants to perform simple work in return for their state handouts, which includes housing, food, and pocket money, the new plan asks private companies to pay migrants €1 an hour for their labour, reports Welt. although exact plans have yet to be released, the wage would be likely topped up to the €8.50 minimum wage by government subsidy — a programme that is being called “occupational therapy” in Germany.
While German economists applauded efforts to integrate migrants into the job market as quickly as possible Marcel Fratzscher, head of the German Institute for Economic Research said “publicly funded job opportunities do not appear to be the right way to bring refugees to work”, reports Rheinische Post.
While the government paying migrants to work might help in the short term, it was not a long term answer to the solution and would ultimately not provide a “springboard” into the jobs market. Better would be to spend the money on giving migrants qualifications instead, he suggested.
What effect flooding the German job market with hundreds of thousands of €1 an hour labourers would do to the employment prospects of regular Germans has apparently not yet figured in discussions.
Among the German establishment that migrants will arrive in large numbers is taken as a given, and so discussions are primarily focussed on what to do with them once they have arrived, and in particular how to mould them into efficient, tax paying Germans. As Breitbart London reported this week, the German job market is only capable of absorbing 350,000 foreigners a year, well below the 1.5 million who were thought to have arrived in 2015.
Even if the 100,000 jobs being subsidised by the government were above and beyond this 350,000, rather than the government effectively giving a handout to businesses who would have hired migrants anyway the 450,000 is still well short, leaving hundreds of thousands on state handouts. As reported in October, Germany secretly forecast over 80 per cent of migrants had no qualifications whatsoever, and the country could expect at least 400,000 new benefit claimants this year.
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