The German government has announced a new migration scheme in Africa to recruit supposedly qualified migrants to do jobs in Germany – despite its Turkish “guest worker” programme being a historic disaster.
German Employment Minister Hubertus Heil and Development Minister Svenja Schulze, who are both members of the leftist Social Democrats (SPD), announced the programme while on a visit to Ghana, adding that similar programmes would be set up in other African countries.
“Qualified employees are a way of guaranteeing our standard of living into the future,” Minister Heil claimed according to a report by European Union-funded website InfoMigrants.
“We need to be alert to the possibilities of finding qualified personnel both within our country and without,” he continued, adding: “If it is managed in the right way, migration can be an enormous potential for developing our economy in the countries we work with as well as in our own country.”
But previous experiments with using mass migration to beat supposed labour shortages have been a disaster, with hundreds of thousands of Turkish gastarbeiter (guest workers) who began to be imported from the 1960s integrating poorly, so that as of 2017 some three million Turks in German actually had a collective unemployment rate three times higher than the national average, according to Reuters.
The influx also added previously unknown cultural issues to the social mix, such as clashes between ethnic Turks and ethnic Kurds on German streets.
Healthcare is said to be one of the sectors focused on as part of the African migration employment programme, although the World Health Organisation (WHO) has reportedly claimed that Ghana, in particular, has its own shortage of qualified professionals in the medical field — so Western countries plundering it for skilled health workers is morally questionable.
Nevertheless, the leftist government and other officials are insisting on more immigration, with Chairman of the German Board of the Federal Employment Agency Detlef Scheele claiming in 2021 that the country needed at least 400,000 new migrants per year in order to make up for labour shortfalls.
“From nursing to air conditioning technicians to logisticians and academics: there will be a shortage of skilled workers everywhere,” Scheele said, claiming that “[y]ou can stand up and say ‘we don’t want foreigners’ but that doesn’t work.”
German Economy and Climate Protection Minister Robert Habeck made similar comments last year, saying Germany has “300,000 job openings today” and that Germans should “expect that to climb to a million and more.”
But Germany has already seen huge influxes of illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees in recent years, particularly from Syria, the wider Middle East, and Africa, who even more than the Turkish guest workers and their descendants are overwhelmingly not supporting themselves, never mind increasing German productivity.
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