The mass immigration from Islamic countries into central and western Europe has been a debacle, particularly in those countries the migrants have selected as desirable destinations, like Germany and Sweden. (Who wouldn’t?) In Germany, the disaster has been such that in at least one poll, 40% of Germans want Chancellor Angela Merkel to resign over her refugee policy.
So Germany’s government is trying to adopt a more rational approach toward the million or so migrants who have chosen to call the country home. On Sunday, Germany’s Labor Minister, Andrea Nahles, wrote in one of the country’s principal newspapers that migrants will suffer consequences if they fail to conform to German mores:
“If you come to us seeking protection and wanting to start a new life, you have to stick to our rules and values,” Nahles wrote in an op-ed for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
“If you signal that you can’t integrate, your benefits will be cut.”
Nahles added that migrants’ welfare payments should be linked to their attendance at German language classes and to their behaviour.
Anyone seeking help in Germany must “bring all of their abilities, their strength to work and their own property,” the Social Democratic Party (SPD) politician said.
Nahles also announced that she had tasked her ministry with producing a new draft law on integration to slash bureaucracy and set aside cash resources to fund the process.
The devil, of course, is in the execution. It is hard to imagine that the German government will be able to track the enormous number of individual migrants, to figure out whether they are seriously attending German classes and engaging in proper “behaviour,” and to cut their welfare payments accordingly. That is probably too much to expect from any country’s bureaucracy.
But it is noteworthy that the German government is at least trying to palliate its citizens’ outrage over the irrational immigration scheme that has been imposed on them by Angela Merkel’s administration.
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