The Chancellor intends to ask major German companies to employ more refugees
As "Russkaya Germaniya" notes, the goal of the Wir zusammen program, launched in 2015, is to integrate refugees into the German labor market; currently, about 100 companies from the top list of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange are participating. According to Bloomberg, in 2015, the combined efforts of the participating companies created 3,000 internship positions for refugees and 300 apprenticeship places. Of these, fewer than 500 were filled. In 2016, 1,800 refugees completed internships. As reported by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 30 leading German companies participating in the program hired only 54 refugees, of which 50 were employed by Deutsche Post.
These figures look even more insignificant against the backdrop of the total number of migrants Germany accepted last year: about 1.5 million people.
"Without a significant influx of migrants, the German economy will miss 4.5 million workers in the next 10 years," warns David Folkerts-Landau, chief economist at Deutsche Bank. "This will lead to a decline in average GDP growth from the current 1.5% to 0.5% per year, and by 2030, to stagnation. Only through mass immigration will Germany be able to maintain its standard of living and its place among the three or four most important countries in the world in the long term."
A more realistic assessment comes from Professor Axel Plünnecke, a leading expert on immigration, education and innovation at the Cologne Institute for Economic Research (IW): "Accepting refugees is first and foremost a humanitarian task," he emphasizes. "People from Syria, Afghanistan or Eritrea cannot contribute to solving the skills shortage – they first need to learn German and improve their professional qualifications. Currently, German companies need 164,000 workers with science and engineering specialties. And the skills shortage would be significantly higher today if Germany had not benefited from immigration. But according to our data, the largest number of specialists came from India, Spain, Poland and Russia."
Professor Bernd Raffelhüschen of the University of Freiburg fully agrees that Germany needs migrants today. "But Germany is the only immigration country in the world that has no rules," the scholar complains and calls for the adoption of an immigration law that "would essentially be a restriction law – to allow only those who are needed into the country." "According to Destatis, there are already hundreds of thousands of unemployed people in Germany with no qualifications," says the professor. "Now, up to 1.5 million migrants have been added, of whom about 70% are also unskilled. But their upkeep will require a large-scale tax increase."
As reported by The Wall Street Journal, the German Finance Ministry plans to spend €77.6 billion over the next four years on providing for, housing and training refugees, as well as on aid to the countries they come from to stop the flow. According to the plan, €24 billion will go towards covering social benefits that will be provided to migrants after they receive refugee status.
According to Professor Hans-Werner Sinn, president of the Munich Institute for Economic Research (ifo), "the main thing is that refugees get jobs and thus begin to integrate into German society. The costs will in any case fall on the shoulders of taxpayers. The only question is whether we will pay subsidies to those working or fully support the unemployed."