Germany shuns “foreign” families
Immigrants and their German-born children find themselves cut off from state benefits.
Topics: Germany, Middle East, World War II, Life News
Ayse Barzani was a 25-year-old mother of two when she got the unexpected
news that she was pregnant again.
The young Kurdish refugee, who asked that her real name not be used, was
scared. Her husband’s salary barely covered the costs of raising two
children; she didn’t know how they could afford a third.
In the United States, Barzani would have had few options besides
welfare. But in Germany, at least theoretically, the government provides
— financially — for growing families.
“Everything that you don’t have in America is everything that we do have
in Germany,” says Guenter Kolb, spokesman for the social benefits office
in Baden-Wurttemburg, the southern German state where Barzani lives.
But the magnanimity of the state has its limits; and Barzani, an
immigrant with refugee status, learned that she is not the intended
beneficiary of the “everything” that Kolb proudly mentions. Most
importantly, she is excluded from a stipend that non-immigrants with
virtually the same financial profile receive to help them stay at home
and raise young children.
Back in 1986, the German government began offering federal subsidies
designed to encourage parents to have more children and to stay at home
with them, at least during their earliest years. The country’s
plummeting birth rate — and average of just 1.8 children per household
— inspired the creation of the stipend, which works on a sliding scale.
Under the guidelines, in a family where one parent works less than 19
hours a week and the annual household income is less than about $50,000,
parents can receive about $315 a month for the first seven months of a
child’s life. After that, depending on the parents’ income, families are
eligible to receive anywhere from about $22 to about $315 a month, until the
child is 24 months old.
Four German states extend the federal aid to offer parents with little
income an extra year of financial aid. In Baden-Wurttemburg, the
supplemental state subsidy is around $210 a month for parents whose
monthly income is less than $1,300.
Barzani came to Baden-Wurttemburg in 1992 after fleeing southeastern
Turkey with her husband and their two young children. They won political
asylum but were not granted German citizenship. After her third child
was born, Barzani began receiving federal benefits of about $315 a
month. But when she applied for state child-rearing money,
Baden-Wurttemburg officials turned her away. As a Turkish national, they
argued, she did not qualify.
The family found that it could not make ends meet without the state
money. Although they could have applied for welfare, Barzani did not
want to have to depend on social assistance when she could support her
family with money that is meant to be available to Germans.
In a lawsuit against the state, she argued that she and her husband, as
legal residents who pay the same taxes as other Germans, are entitled to
the same benefits. In August, she won the suit, but has yet to receive
the approximately $2,520 she is owed retroactively. The benefits are
being withheld as Baden-Wurttemburg’s social welfare office tries to
convince Germany’s highest court to overturn the decision. A judgment is
expected this month.
Whatever the federal administrative court decides, the ruling will apply
to every state with programs that extend payment of child-rearing money.
Millions of children growing up in Germany will be affected, but the
greatest impact will be on the Turks. They make up the largest
immigrant population in the country, and many do not have German
citizenship.
“She was certainly not aware of the impact she would have,” says
Barzani’s lawyer, Juergen Blechengar. “For her, the motivations were
personal. She was concerned with how she could support her family
without going on welfare. It was a matter of pride.
“She just wanted the same benefits that others get here.”
The case is being argued at a time of significant tension between
Germans and the country’s foreign residents. This fall, the German
People’s Union, a far-right political group, won seats in the
Brandenburg state parliament on a platform of anti-foreigner
nationalism. And, more than 30 years after the first of millions of
Turks were brought in to help rebuild post-World War II Germany, many
second- and third-generation German-born foreigners still have not been
granted German citizenship.
Meanwhile, legislative steps — all of them controversial — have been
taken to bring immigrants into the national fold.
On Jan. 1, the German government began offering citizenship
to all legal immigrants if the immigrants request it. But many Turks
now say they aren’t interested. They say they still feel like strangers
and outcasts in Germany, and that citizenship will not make them feel
any more welcome.
Also this year, children who are born in Germany will automatically get
German citizenship. It is especially disheartening to the immigrant population that
such a long and costly legal battle has been launched over just two
years’ worth of benefits. This case, they say, reinforces how alienated
they feel in Germany.
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