Half of Welfare Recipients in Germany Are Foreign Citizens, Left-Wing Populists Reveal

German left-wing populists have revealed data which shows 48 per cent of all recipients of state out-of-work cash payments are not German citizens, with some migrant groups majority unemployed.

Over two and a half million foreign residents in Germany are drawing the Bürgergeld — ‘citizen’s allowance’ — the German state benefit that pays out cash to those who don’t or can’t work, or who work so little their income needs topping up to survival levels. This group represents 48 per cent of all recipients in Germany, with 2.7 million foreigners claiming compared to 2.9 million German citizens.

The number of Germans receiving out-of-work payouts has been falling or stable for years, having been as high as 3.3 million as recently as 2021. By contrast, the number of migrants taking the money continues to rise steadily, having been two million three years ago.

Germany’s Die Welt reports the data shows some refugee groups show a strong propensity towards being unemployed. Nearly half (47 per cent) of Afghans get Bürgergeld, while 55 per cent of Syrians take the benefit, even if this is down from a high of a staggering 85 per cent of Syrians during the Europe Migrant Crisis years.

This release of data was achieved by the upstart Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW, Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance) eponymous party founded by Sahra Wagenknecht earlier this year. The party has distinguished itself by being one of few European left-wing populist parties, opposed to mass migration but against economically liberal policies favoured by many right-wing populists.

While the borders are so often blurred here — Marine Le Pen’s French faction is typically referred to as hard-right in the establishment media, yet it pursues a pretty doggedly left-wing economic policy — the BSW argues that a strong welfare state can only work long-term if it isn’t open to the whole world. As reported, BSW has already performed well in recent elections for a months-old party.

Responding to the Bürgergeld figures, Wagenknecht said: “The fact that almost half of the citizens’ allowance recipients do not have a German passport is evidence of the failure of German migration and integration policy and contributes to the fact that the citizens’ allowance has become increasingly unpopular.”

Buttressing her left-populist position, Wagenknecht asserted that a “strong welfare state only works if not everyone can immigrate to it.”

While these figures acquired by the left-wing populists drastically illustrate the impact of first-generation immigration on the welfare bill, it doesn’t explain whether there is a phenomenon of long-term intergenerational unemployment among migrant communities. Given Germany, as is normal for European states, adopts the conceit that second-generation migrants are in fact German, the published statistics obscure the possibility of such enquiry.

Some groups in Germany have attempted to work around this facet of official statistics, however. For instance, the right-wing AfD populist party managed to roughly proxy the impact of second-generation immigration on sex crime statistics by securing the release of the forenames of all gang rape suspects in one state, finding a majority have what would generously be termed non-traditional names.

“A clear trend is evident”, they said, with their own analysis and that separately of the same data by a mainstream German newspaper suggesting over three-quarters of gang rape suspects that year had “migrant heritage” forenames.