As Germany vows to continue spending heavily on its liberal migration policy — more than €36 billion in 2023 alone — an increasing number of the country’s senior citizens are reported to be at a growing risk of poverty.
Federal government data published under a request from several Alternative for Germany (AfD) lawmakers revealed that 28.1 percent of the German elderly are at risk of poverty, a figure that is higher than the EU average of 27.4 percent and far greater than its Western European neighbors of France (19.1 percent), Belgium (17.4 percent), and Luxembourg (9.3 percent).
This is 8.3 percentage points higher than before former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her ultra-liberal policy of mass immigration came to power in 2005. The risk of poverty for German senior citizens thus rose by 40 percent under “Mutti” Merkel.
Despite the federal government budgeting €163 billion a year to fund its welfare state, senior citizens are being short shortchanged. Less than 40 percent of these funds are spent on caring and providing for the elderly, yet again lower than the EU average of over 44 percent and far behind Western European neighbors where the figure is closer to 60 percent.
And so, while Germany’s elderly have contributed to a state that demands its citizens pay the second-highest taxes in the European Union, they are often neglected once they are no longer “useful” and sent out to pasture.
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Government policies have contributed to the mess the country now finds itself in. With a dwindling labor force, a decreasing birth rate, and 20 percent of the population now over the age of 65, those contributing to the economy are becoming fewer and fewer each year.
Similar to France, the German government has thrown all its eggs into the basket of mass immigration in a bid to kick-start the economy, but this is proving immensely costly. Germany is expected to spend more than €36 billion this year on providing for migrants, all at a time when Germans are dealing with a weakening economy and rising inflation. In 2020, Germany indicated it would spend €64 billion over the course of four years, but costs have soared far higher due to huge influxes of migrants since then.
This is in stark contrast to countries such as Poland and Hungary, who have countered the European birth rate decline by introducing family-friendly policies and tax cuts to entice couples to have more children, with children far more invested in their elderly family members than newcomers from other countries. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán also recently announced plans to mobilize economically inactive Hungarian citizens who want to work, prioritizing them to fill the gaps in the country’s workforce ahead of mass low-skilled migration, which risks both the security and the cultural heritage of the nation.
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With 163,000 migrants arriving in Germany in the first three months of this year — 80,978 illegal immigrants arriving mostly from countries like Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey and Iraq, while 81,647 Ukrainian war refugees also entered the country — the post-Merkel federal government appears intent on carrying on where she left off.
This, unfortunately, means a disproportionate level of attention and funding on new arrivals, many of whom refuse to integrate into German society. It also leads to an irreversible change in the country’s culture and security, while at the same time neglecting German senior citizens who have worked their entire lives and contributed to the economy, only to be cast aside.
Perhaps most evident of this trend is that city and state governments are increasingly evicting senior citizens to make room for migrants
