No More Cash for Rejected Asylum Seekers

Wagenknecht recently provided another perfect example of this, with reference to asylum policy. Everyone in Germany knows that she has a conservative position on this issue. It was well-known even before she left Die Linke and founded the BSW. So, you would think that she no longer needs to make a name for herself here. And yet she has done so, with unprecedented sharpness — radicalizing her image.

Wagenknecht has called for people whose asylum applications have been rejected to have their funding cut. “The fact that the state continues to pay the same benefits after a rejection is inexplicable to the taxpayer,” she told the news agency DPA. “After a transitional period, cash benefits should be discontinued if there is no protected status.”

This would not only affect those who actually have to leave the country within thirty days and can be deported with legal legitimacy but also all people “tolerated” to remain in Germany: those who did not qualify for protected status, but do have a form of temporary residence permit. To put numbers on it: there are around fifteen thousand rejected asylum seekers without tolerated status who have to leave the country or can be legally deported, but more than one hundred thousand with “tolerated” status.

Yet, Wagenknecht acknowledges no such distinction. She lumps them all together, implicitly questioning the justification for tolerated status. Yet there are a number of legitimate reasons for this “tolerance.” Asylum seekers are granted this status if they do not qualify for asylum, but it is nevertheless too dangerous for them to return to their home country, for example because of the civil war raging in Syria or because the Taliban are running a government of terror in Afghanistan.
There are also people who have started an apprenticeship, who are seriously ill, who have a child with a residence permit, or who are closely related to a person with tolerated status. Finally, there are some who do not have the papers necessary to be taken back by their country of origin.

Wagenknecht wants to cut off all the aid these people currently receive — and thus exert economic pressure on them to leave the country, even though they do have a residence permit. Put plainly: Wagenknecht wants to blackmail tolerated people by withdrawing their income. Whether they then have to give up their education, leave relatives behind, or even return to the land of the Taliban is irrelevant in this view — as long as they get out of Germany. This sounds harsh, even misanthropic and coldhearted, but it is the logical consequence of these demands.

Yet anyone who genuinely believes that asylum seekers would allow themselves to be forced back to their home country, where conditions are intolerable, is naive. In reality, it is much more likely that they will simply be forced into the black market and the criminal underworld if they are robbed of their last euro of aid. That is irresponsible.

Wagenknecht Flouts the Constitution

But thank our lucky stars for the German constitution! Because what Wagenknecht is demanding is, in fact, unconstitutional. The Federal Constitutional Court has already established through several rulings the basic right to a decent minimum subsistence level in accordance with Article 20 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany. This includes refugees and asylum seekers: “German and foreign nationals residing in the Federal Republic of Germany are equally entitled to this basic right,” a 2012 ruling reads.

Ten years later, in 2022, the court went even further and made it clear that how much money asylum seekers are entitled to should not depend on “migration policy considerations.” The court stated, “migration-policy considerations of keeping benefits paid to asylum seekers and refugees low to avoid incentives for migration, if benefits were high compared to international standards, may generally not justify any reduction of benefits below the physical and socio-cultural existential minimum.” The human dignity guaranteed by Article 1 of the Basic Law cannot be minimized or relativized to suit the agenda of a punitive migration policy. Not even by Sahra Wagenknecht.

Meanwhile, the AfD and the right wing of the Christian Democrats have been delighted by Wagenknecht’s statements. Bavaria’s interior minister, Joachim Herrmann (of this state’s conservative Christian Social Union), immediately came out publicly in support of the initiative. The demand is grist to the right-wing mill in several ways.

Firstly, because rejected asylum seekers are portrayed as a significant problem and as social parasites. Yet the truth is that even if every single person who could be legally deported was deported tomorrow — that is, around fifteen thousand — local authorities would still be overburdened. What would really help them become unburdened? One way would be to demand more money for local authorities. Yet Wagenknecht has not called for this. Nor has she demanded a massive boost in funding for social housing, or a recruiting drive for teachers and educators in overburdened schools, or for more employees in bogged-down immigration authorities.

Instead, Wagenknecht offers a false solution that stigmatizes asylum seekers in order to score points within the AfD milieu. In other words, she’s punching down to raise the profile of her BSW party without offering any real solution to the problems she is highlighting. But if enacted, her demands would certainly create new problems for asylum seekers: more degradation, stigmatization, financial hardship, hunger, and existential fear than ever before. And all of this for members of society who are often already condemned to fight for the dregs of the modern economy: the worst jobs, the worst housing, and so on.

Secondly, Wagenknecht is only fanning the flames of the Right because she has adopted wholesale their “commonsense” economic metaphors.

According to Wagenknecht, money for rejected asylum seekers is “no longer justifiable to taxpayers.” She paints a picture of society in which hardworking Hermann the German no longer wants to use his hard-earned taxes to finance illegal asylum seekers. And because the state only has the money it gets from its taxpayers, money is scarce. Any money asylum seekers receive is money missing from the pockets of German pensioners and German roads.

She doesn’t spell it out so plainly herself, but that is clearly how it is received. The weakest are pitted against the poorest and the wider population is whipped up into a frenzy in the hope that next time they will vote for BSW.

No Help for Pensioners

There is nothing new about this framing, and right-wingers have always loved it. Anyone who visits the Topography of Terror museum in Berlin — a massive exhibition on the Nazi era — will find a number of similar examples. I will quote just one, a poster advertisement from 1938 for the monthly magazine Neues Volk of the Nazi Party’s Racial Policy Office. The image shows a doctor standing behind a man who is obviously ill, with the slogan: “60,000 Reichsmark is what this hereditary patient will cost the national community for life. Fellow German [Volksgenosse], that’s your money too!” This example shows how destructive the logic of this kind of framing can be.

It’s also worth stressing that on a fundamental economic level, it is nonsense. Money is not scarce. National currency is not created because Hermann the German pays his taxes, but because the state (in this case, the European Central Bank) creates it. Labor can be scarce, resources can be scarce, but money is not. Moreover, German pensioners do not have insufficient pensions because rejected asylum seekers are provided a minimum subsistence-level existence, but because recent governments have enacted policies bad for pensioners. It’s here that Wagenknecht should focus her populist ire, instead of making scapegoats of asylum seekers.

The idea that tax money is scarce is no invention of Wagenknecht’s. Admittedly, virtually all establishment politicians — even some from Die Linke, the Greens, and the Social Democrats — take this for granted. It has established itself as a supposed consensus, even though it is economically baseless and socially destructive. The museum example is clearly not intended to imply that Wagenknecht is close to Nazis. Nevertheless, she bears responsibility for the consequences of her words.

In general, Wagenknecht isn’t using right-wing populist rhetoric because she herself is right wing (as she is often accused of), but because her electoral strategy demands it. She is willing to throw tolerated asylum seekers under the bus as a kind of calculated collateral damage. This ugly calculation leaves us with two questions. A strategic question: Will this bring her and the BSW success? Only the upcoming elections will tell us that. And a moral question: Does the end justify such means? I don’t think so.