Bavaria’s Minister of the Interior, Joachim Herrmann (CSU), has warned the federal government not to push immigration that lacks education.
“This has significant consequences for integration into work. With little or no schooling, it’s a long way to a living income for yourself and even more for the whole family,” warned Hermann on Monday.
A mixture of immigration of skilled workers and asylum policy sends the wrong signals and also promotes illegal immigration. It is true that it is right to use the potential of migrants. “But it is simply unrealistic to conclude from this that refugee migration and the immigration of skilled workers can be equated,” Hermann explained.
He was referring to figures from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), according to which fewer and fewer migrants with higher education are requesting asylum in this country. For example, more than half of all Afghans and Somalis coming to Germany only have primary school education.
Syrian immigrants also had an ever lower level of education.
“There can be no question of qualified immigration here either,” he affirmed. “I warn the federal government not to set incentives for even more unqualified people to make their way to Germany in the hope of finding work.”
Herrmann praised former guest workers, however, the Bavarian interior minister had in the past made positive comments about uneducated immigration. Most recently, he praised the recruitment agreements that the Federal Republic had concluded with various countries between 1955 and 1968.
“From a purely economic point of view, we have to make it clear: Without the many hard-working people from Turkey, but also from Italy, Spain, Greece, Morocco and many other countries, the economic engine in Germany would have stuttered,” emphasized Herrmann.
Nowadays, German politicians regularly claim that the Federal Republic called in the guest workers from Turkey in the 1960s. In fact, the initiative came from the countries of origin, as migration researcher Johannes-Dieter Steinert explained in an interview on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the recruitment agreement.
Turkey, which was politically unstable and economically weak at the time, hoped that the measure would result in a wage transfer, since it was clear that the guest workers would send the money home to their families. The Turkish government also assumed that their compatriots would return after a few years, with the expectation that their skills acquired abroad would benefit the Turkish economy.
As Remix News previously reported, Germany’s Turkish population is arguably the worst-integrated migrant group in Germany, according to a report from the Berlin-based Institute for Population and Development.
The report found that immigrants of Turkish origin were the “least successful of all immigrant groups in the labor market and they are often jobless, the percentage of housewives is high and many are dependent on welfare… The state of Saarland was found to have the worst record — 45 percent of its Turks had no educational qualification of any kind.”
