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Austrian minister wants foreigners to improve German level to keep social benefits

Austrian's Integration Minister, Susanne Raab, from the conservative ÖVP, has floated the idea of making it mandatory for immigrants to reach a certain level of German if receiving social benefits to better integrate them into the labour market.

Published: 24 August 2023 16:47 CEST

A person studying. Photo by lilartsy on Unsplash

Raab, of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), said she could envisage a system that saw people receiving certain types of social welfare support – known as Sozialhilfe – having to reach a “certain level of language proficiency” within a period of time to keep their benefits.

At the moment, she said, only attendance is compulsory in order not to lose social assistance.

Raab was speaking out at a presentation of the ‘Integration Report’ on Thursday, reported Austrian newspaper Der Standard.

“We are thinking about how to map this in law,” Raab said.

The minister also advocated for a waiting period for immigrants to be able to access social assistance in Austria based on the Danish model.

As The Local reported, the ÖVP has stated that foreigners should live in Austria for five years before being eligible to claim benefits.

Raab said the social system should “not be an incentive” for immigration.

She said she had “no understanding” why so many people don’t make the leap into the labour market despite completing several courses and are instead stuck in an “endless course loop”.

“I think it is unacceptable, especially in the current labour market situation, that people spend years in the welfare system,” Raab said, adding that it’s not always about “German at university level”, but about basic skills.

Of the foreign nationals who arrived in Austria in 2022, seven out of 10 had literacy needs, Raab said. This proportion is highest among Syrians, at 78 percent.

Katharina Pabel, chairperson of the integration advisory board, said there was a need to provide immigrants with more assistance.

Pabel called for a more flexible German language offer, such as the online German learning units organised by the Integration Fund (ÖIF), which are tailored to entry-level jobs.

However, there’s strong opposition.

The liberal NEOS party integration spokesman Yannick Shetty accused Raab of “further pandering to the FPÖ (Freedom Party) with the populist demand for cuts in social benefits”.

Experts also hit back at the idea of establishing a ‘performance requirement’.

Christoph Riedl, asylum expert at the Diakonie social welfare organisation, said he doubted linking performance in courses to benefits would be allowed under international law. The Geneva Convention on Refugees provides for equal treatment of refugees and citizens, he told Der Standard.

According to Lukas Gahleitner-Gertz of the Asylkoordination group for asylum seekers, this requirement would have to apply to every nationality coming to Austria from abroad in order to be in line with EU law.

How many people with a migration background live in Austria?

Austria is a diverse country. The latest figures show that every fourth person in Austria has a migration background.

A total of 2.35 million people with a migration background lived in Austria in 2022, Tobias Thomas, Director General of Statistics Austria said on Thursday. The share of those whose parents were both born abroad rose from 25.4 percent the previous year to 26.4 percent of the total population at the end of 2022.

The largest group of the 1.7 million foreigners living in Austria as of January 1st this year were German citizens (225,000), followed by Romanians (147,500), Serbians (121,900), and Turkish nationals (119,700).

The countries of origin Croatia, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Syria, Ukraine, and Poland are ranked in fifth to 10th spot. The strongest increases since 2015 in absolute numbers were among Romanians (with an increase of 74,100), Ukrainians (a hike of 71,000), Syrians (plus 70,900) and Germans (an increase of 54,500).

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With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced on Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.