Milton Friedman once said open borders and
the welfare state are incompatible. This is easy to prove in
California, where, according to a recent essay by Victor
Davis Hanson, half of all immigrant households are on welfare and the state
accounts for a third of the nation's welfare recipients with only 12% of its
population, even as 20% of California's population lives below the poverty
line. Recent figures published in Europe's economic powerhouse,
Germany, indicate that following Angela Merkel's disastrous open-borders
experiment of two and a half years ago, that country is well on its way to
joining California in proving the wisdom of Friedman's admonition, to the huge
detriment of the German people.
Official figures of the German statistical office show that
beginning in 2015, Germany accepted 1.4 million asylum
applications. According to detailed
figures from 2016, 71.4% were granted asylum or "subsidiary"
protected status, while 28.6% were rejected. Being rejected,
however, did not at all mean that you had to leave Germany or were in danger of
being deported. Most of those rejected filed an appeal (64,251 in
2016), and 31.7% of those received a negative decision. Even then,
few of those rejected left voluntarily, and even fewer were
deported. According to the daily Die Welt, citing government
figures, most of the migrants remain in Germany, regardless of the asylum
decision.
Because very few of the refugees would qualify as persecuted for
their political or religious beliefs, the traditional reasons for claiming
refugee status, under Merkel, the German government has de facto created
a right to better life for migrants from poor countries, which means that the
economic incentives to migration remain extremely powerful. Indeed,
nobody in Germany has any illusions about this. The difference
between the nominally conservative CSU of Bavaria and the pro-immigration
social democrats (SPD), for instance, is that the former want to limit
immigration to 200,000 per annum, while the latter do not want any limits at
all.
In reality, this is a phony debate, because German law allows chain
migration, which means that the actual numbers will be dramatically higher in
the future, regardless of politicians' grandstanding. The law says a
recognized refugee has the right to bring in his spouse and children, while
minor migrants, who made 36% of the total in 2016, can also bring their parents
and their siblings. Since 2015, 230,000 migrants have had their
reunification applications accepted, while another 390,000 refugees from Syria
alone will be eligible by the end of 2018, according to the Focus Online weekly
of August 29, 2017. On the basis of these figures alone,
reunification will bring at least 2.5 million migrants in the next few
years. Should the approved minimum of 200,000 migrants per year
materialize, which is nearly certain, the yearly addition of mostly Muslim and
mostly young migrants would swell to approximately 800,000. This
could easily overwhelm a country that has a median age of 47.1 and
a fertility rate of 1.47,
nearly a third below replacement.
Dismal as these prospects are, of more immediate concern are the
huge and clearly unsustainable social and economic costs of the large-scale
migration that has already taken place. The mainstream media in
Germany are as predictably leftist and pro-immigration as their American
counterparts and are notoriously reluctant to report the reality, but the
numerous existing think-tanks and institutes make sure that it cannot be hidden
for long. Various institutes estimate migrants per capita cost at
2,500 euros per month and twice as much for unaccompanied
minors. The total cost per
year per million refugees ranges from a low of 30 billion euros by the
federal minister of development, Gerd Mueller, to 77 billion euros and
more. It's worth noting that even the lowest figure is higher than
the 27 billion euros Germany spends on its defense budget and that the actual
number of migrants at present is already much closer to 2 million.
Perhaps the most disturbing finding about the new wave of migrants
is that contrary to the early sanguine predictions by the left of a new
"Wirtschaftswunder" in Germany on account of the migrant labor, the
future is anything but rosy. Research has shown that most new
migrants have neither much of an education nor any skills. According
to the World Bank, only 6% of Syrian refugees have finished high school, and
59% do not have any education. And the Syrians are considerably
better off in this respect than migrants from Africa – or Afghanistan, for
instance, where 52% of the male migrants are illiterate.
Nor are earlier assimilation efforts with the gastarbeiter of
the 1960s and 1970s much of a success. According to a study of
the German Institute
for Economic Research, most Turks in Germany still live off
welfare. They also continue to entertain strong Islamist sympathies
after decades of living in Europe. Sixty-three percent of them voted
for the Islamist Erdoğan in the recent referendum in Turkey, a percentage considerably
higher than that in Turkey proper.
Finally, Chancellor Merkel again threatened Eastern Europe with
economic consequences in a speech to the Bundestag on February
22. Follow my disastrous migration policies and take your "fair
share" of migrants, she told them, or else. This is the kind of
"solidarity" Eastern Europe should have no problem refusing.
AlexAlexiev is chairman of the Center for Balkan and Black
Sea Studies. He can be reached at alexievalex4@gmail.com.