Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner and Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann have called for cuts in benefits for asylum seekers. “Under particularly strict conditions, a reduction in benefits to virtually zero would be conceivable,” wrote the two FDP politicians in a guest article in “Welt am Sonntag”.
They suggest this for people “who are entitled to humanitarian protection in the EU state responsible for them according to the Dublin rules, but who refuse to take advantage of the protection there. In these cases, it would be conceivable to extend the benefit to the to reduce reimbursement of necessary travel costs to the responsible state.”
The ministers also criticize the level of basic benefits for asylum seekers in initial reception centers. There are “good objective reasons to doubt whether people in an initial reception center, who are often provided with media in common rooms,” “really incur” expenses such as newspapers and magazines that are currently provided for in the benefits.
Lindner and Buschmann also advocate that those affected should not be paid out so-called analogue benefits after 18 months, as is currently the case, which correspond in amount to citizens’ benefit. Instead, according to the ideas of the FDP politicians, they should only receive basic benefits under the Asylum Seekers Benefits Act until their residence status has been legally clarified. In this context, the ministers warn that asylum court procedures must become “more uniform and faster throughout Germany”.
You are also in favor of introducing an electronic payment card for asylum seekers. Lindner also linked an agreement with the federal states on asylum costs to benefits in kind or payment cards for asylum seekers. “If the states want to have an agreement with the federal government on financial issues about the costs of migration, then I expect the nationwide introduction of payment cards or benefits in kind,” he told the “Stuttgarter Zeitung” and the “Stuttgarter Nachrichten” as well as the Neue newspapers Berlin Editorial Society (Saturday).
In their guest article for “Welt am Sonntag”, Lindner and Buschmann call for “a new realpolitik in the area of irregular migration”. A “naive “We can do it” must be turned into a “realistic “We have to do better”,” write Lindner and Buschmann, referring to the sentence from 2015 coined by former Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) in connection with the so-called refugee crisis . They are campaigning for the reform of the Common European Asylum Policy, which aims “to ensure that people seeking protection for obviously unfounded reasons receive their negative decisions at the European external border and do not come to us in the first place.”
