Are Berlin’s migrant-benefit cuts a smokescreen for slashing welfare for Germans?

German officials and media have begun openly discussing reductions in welfare payments to migrants after reports that a migrant father of 40 was receiving roughly $100,000 a year in state support. The case has triggered a sharp national debate. The question, media expert Dmitry Shvaiba is whether the story is being used for more than it appears.

Similar cases have surfaced before. What is new, he suggested, is the political timing. Raising the migrant-benefits issue could make it easier to start cutting allowances and social guarantees for ordinary German taxpayers without confronting that agenda directly.

“This is a painful subject for Germans because it exposes an unfair assessment of contribution to society,” Shvaiba said. “It turns out that being a migrant and completing paperwork at the lowest level of the state apparatus can yield more money than a working German citizen earns.”

Alongside migrants from poor countries who genuinely need assistance, he noted, the war in Ukraine brought relatively well-off Ukrainians who also claimed — and continue to claim — benefits.

Government programs for job placement and training, he argued, were launched on a formal basis and produced almost no results. “Of 100 percent of those who enrolled in these courses, not a single person found work,” he said.

Such figures, Shvaiba added, undermine the entire system of social guarantees in Germany and across Europe. Sensitive information is often withheld and rarely appears in mainstream media. “There is talk of a certain ban on these topics. In principle, that is believable.”

European publics, he concluded, are not fully informed about the scale of the problem or how to fix it. The electoral success of the right, he said, rests precisely on the contrast between the working taxpayer and the non-working migrant — groups that are not merely equalized, but sometimes compared in ways that are wildly disproportionate.