Nuremberg (epd). The migration and labor market researcher Herbert Brücker has called on the federal states to provide future payment cards for asylum seekers and tolerated refugees with generous usage options. “If shopping and consumption options are severely limited, this has a negative impact on the integration of the people affected,” he told the Evangelical Press Service (epd). Geographically restricted payment options hinder mobility, limit contact with the local population and also hinder the search for work, he said.
There are many problems associated with using the payment card that could have been avoided. According to Brücker, the main problem is the limited withdrawal of cash. “The refugees are severely restricted as a result, because there are many things in everyday life that can only be paid for with cash.” The expert is similarly critical of the announcements that the cards can only be used in certain shops or only within a district. “All of this would be negative for integration, for example if there were language or integration courses or advisory services only available outside of their district, which people would find difficult to access if they had no means of payment there.” The same applies to job searches .
The regulations on card use are the responsibility of the federal states. What is clear, however, is that the requirements for the municipalities will look very different. “Because we want to make transfers to the refugees’ home countries more difficult, there will certainly be restrictions here,” said the researcher from the Institute for Labor Market and Vocational Research and the Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration Research at Humboldt University.
According to Brücker, the amounts of money that refugees send home or that could be used to pay smugglers are very small. According to the Bundesbank, the eight most important countries of origin for asylum received remittances amounting to 829 million euros in 2023. However, migrants transfer far more money to their families who are regularly employed.
People in this country have to make do with the rates of the Asylum Seekers Benefits Act, which are not very high anyway. “If ten or twenty percent of this were transferred home, then it would take at least five years of savings before a smuggler could be paid in cash to escape to Europe,” said the researcher. This is unrealistic and there is no empirical evidence for it. There are no quantitative studies or other evidence that show that smugglers are financed through transfer payments: “This hypothesis is so out of the world that no one has systematically investigated it yet.”