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People waiting in front of an office for foreign transfers in Lebanon (archive photo)
Photo: Hussein Malla/AP
The payment card for asylum seekers and tolerated people is coming. Hamburg was the first federal state to start issuing prepaid cards on Thursday, and corresponding solutions should be available nationwide by autumn. Fourteen federal states are planning a joint procedure, Bavaria and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania want to go their own way.
“Our payment card comes faster and is harder,” announced Bavarian Prime Minister Söder. "We're stopping online shopping, gambling and transfers abroad." Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) also wants to stop so-called remittances because they represent an incentive for illegal migration. That’s why the introduction of the payment card is a “milestone”.
However, it will be difficult to prove whether the payment card actually has the desired effect. To date, the federal government has no information about how high the remittances actually are by recipients of asylum seeker benefits.
"The federal government has no data on this," says a reply from Lindner's State Secretary Florian Toncar to Left-wing MP Christian Görke, which SPIEGEL has received. The government is just as blank when it comes to the question of how high it estimates the decline in remittances will be as a result of the introduction of the cards. “The federal government has not made any estimates of its own on this,” says Toncar.
It is undisputed that remittances are an important economic factor globally and sometimes exceed the economic aid received by a state. According to Bundesbank estimates, migrants from Germany sent almost 7.2 billion euros back home in 2022. However, the proportion of asylum seekers in this total is unknown.
Because of the level of the benefit rates, experts assume that the amount of transfers will be small and doubt whether they actually represent a significant incentive for migration. "I don't know of any researchers who consider remittances from social benefits to be the big pull factor," Matthias Lücke from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy told SPIEGEL. "This is an absolute sideshow."
Against this background, the traffic light coalition's lack of data could not be inconvenient, suspects Görke. “Maybe she doesn’t want the numbers at all,” said the left-wing politician. “Because it would later turn out that asylum seekers can hardly get anything out of the little money they have for their even poorer families back home.” The payment card is “a fake solution to a fake problem. Every euro spent on the bureaucracy of the payment card would be better invested in accommodation and daycare centers!«
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