The income gap between German and foreign workers is growing rapidly in Germany
As "Russkaya Germaniya" notes, since the beginning of the 21st century, the income gap between German and foreign workers has been growing rapidly: the salaries of immigrants and the native population are growing disproportionately, and the income difference has increased noticeably over the past fifteen years. The income difference is due to differences in qualifications, according to sociologists who analyzed data from the Federal Employment Agency.
This statistics exclusively considers full-time employment with all required contributions to the social insurance system – the absolute political and economic ideal for a worker, which also eliminates statistical distortions due to the many foreigners working part-time or on "mini-jobs." In 2015, there were almost 23 million such "ideal soldiers" of the labor market in Germany: 20.68 million German citizens and 2.08 million foreigners.
The other day, the head of the Federal Chancellery, Peter Altmaier, noted that many foreigners are much better integrated into German society than is commonly assumed. "Integration is possible," assures Angela Merkel's confidant, "and it is succeeding better than many expected. The efforts of recent years are bearing fruit."
In absolute numbers, the picture looks somewhat different. Those foreigners who are lucky enough to find a job manage to earn much less; their incomes grow by less than one percent per year – primarily due to low qualifications, the mismatch of foreign education and vocational training with German realities, and insufficient levels of knowledge, including the German language.
One in five full-time workers in Germany earns the minimum wage (in 2015 – less than 2,056 euros per month). Among foreigners, this is already one in three (36 percent); in 2000, 23 percent of foreigners in Germany had minimum earnings. Today, 11 percent of foreigners with higher education and 4 percent of Germans earn the minimum wage. The highest income difference between citizens and non-citizens is in northern Germany, in the states of Bremen, Lower Saxony, Hamburg, and Schleswig-Holstein; in the south of the country, the earnings of foreigners differ less noticeably from the salaries of the native population.
The presented statistics practically do not account for the dynamics of the labor market in connection with the significant increase in the share of foreign citizens – asylum seekers. Refugees have not yet had a noticeable impact on the growth of employment among foreigners. According to the Nuremberg Institute for Employment Research (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung, IAB) – a research organization of the Federal Employment Agency – from December 2015 to November 2016, 34,000 arrivals from the main non-European countries from which refugees come to the European Union (Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Niger, Eritrea, Nigeria) managed to find employment in Germany. 57 percent found work through temporary employment agencies. 406,000 refugees are registered with the Federal Employment Agency as job seekers.
"If we manage to ensure that in a few years half of the refugees can support themselves, that will be a great success," says IAB Director Joachim Möller. Note that in parallel, 50,000 new jobs have been created in the country related to addressing the humanitarian crisis and the influx of refugees.