While the number of Salafists in Germany reaches a record high and machete-wielding gangs riot on the country's streets, the establishment media not only covers up the fallout from Chancellor Angela Merkel's open door migration policy, but continues to paint a false picture of the country's current state.
"Cool Germany," a cover story on Britain's magazine, The Economist, claims that, "Germany is becoming more open and diverse" and "[m]any of the country's defining traits" including "its ethnic and cultural homogeneity, conformist and conservative society" are "suddenly in flux."
The Economist attributes this change to Chancellor Merkel's migrant policy. "The biggest change comes from Mrs. Merkel's "open door" policy towards refugees, which brought in 1.2 million new migrants in 2015-16. The magazine celebrates the sudden outburst of diversity as its transforms "once-homogeneous Germany" into a "melting-pot" and claims that the "patriarchal culture has become more gender-balanced."
The Economist also advocates the urgent necessity of the open-door policy for refugees, and alleges that the "flow of newcomers to Germany" will "cushion the demographic crunch."
Since the onset of the migrant crisis, which began in the autumn of 2015, much of the mainstream media has been peddling the idea of an influx of hundreds of thousands of migrants from Arab and Muslim countries as a silver bullet for Europe's economic woes. Young and sturdy immigrants were going to bolster Europe's shrinking labor force and usher in the next economic boom, a miracle comparable to Germany's post-war Wirtschaftswunder ("economic miracle").
"Refugees to pay our pension," an editorial headline the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau in February 2016 promised. The migrant "influx ensures rejuvenation that is so urgently needed" and the refugees "will soon pay into our public welfare system," the newspaper pledged.
"The German business community views the recent influx of refugees as an opportunity to help companies grow and ensure long term prosperity," the Der Spiegel reported in its August 2015, issue, just ahead of Merkel's decision to open the country's borders to mass migration. "The business community urgently needs workers," it added.
"What the refugees bring to us is more valuable than gold," said Martin Schulz, Merkel's main political rival and the leader of Germany's Social Democrats (SPD).
"Many [migrants] are in integration courses or waiting to get in them. So I think we will need to show some patience," Merkel said in September 2016.
Unfortunately, these claims and assurances now seem like nothing more than liberal pipe-dreams to push through a pro-immigration policy in Germany.
Instead of lining up to join the German workforce, as the political elite and most of the media were asking us to believe, these young immigrant men, in the hundreds of thousands, took refuge in the Germany's generous welfare system.
 German Chancellor Angela Merkel poses for a selfie with Anas Modamani, a migrant from Syria, outside a shelter for migrants in Berlin, on September 10, 2015. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images) |
"More than half of the able-bodied unemployment benefit receivers at present are of foreign descent," Der Spiegel reported on April 10, 2018. "According to latest numbers complied in September 2017, out of 4.3 million able-bodied welfare recipients, 55.2% were of an immigrant background. In 2013, that figure was 43%."
As of December 2017, an estimated 600,000 able-bodied asylum seekers in Germany were on the dole, the newspaper Die Welt revealed in December, 2017. For the first time in post-war German history, the number of foreigners living on unemployment benefits has crossed the 2-million-mark.
All this has happened, moreover, at time when poverty, especially among elderly pensioners, reached a historic high. Under Merkel's watch, nearly 20% of Germans are threatened by poverty, according to the German Federal Statistical Office. The current level of poverty is "higher than ever since the unification of the Federal Republic and the [Communist] German Democratic Republic," the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported.
Contrary to what the establishment media would have people believe, there is no evidence that the hundreds of thousands of young migrant men pouring into Germany are going to relieve the country's aging work force or become productive citizens in other ways.
Not only are these newly arrived immigrants a strain on Germany's finances, but since their arrival, there has been a surge across the country in violent crime. A recent report commissioned by the German Ministry of Family Affairs found that the newly arrived asylum seekers were behind more than 90% percent of the increase in violent crimes in the northern state of Lower Saxony. Similar trends can be witnessed throughout the country.
According to the country's annual crime report of 2017, compiled by the Federal Crime Bureau (BKA), Germany saw a 50% year-on-year rise in migrant crimes. This tiny but growing minority, that presently makes up less than 2% of the German population, was charged for nearly 15% of all violent crimes, such as rapes and aggravated assaults, the BKA report revealed.
In March, Turkish and Arab gangs "armed with machetes, clubs and baseball bats" clashed on German streets in violent attempts to demarcate gang territories. The country is also in the grip of a stabbing epidemic, with the attackers often turning out to be "unaccompanied minors" holding refugee status.
While media outlets such as The Economist are busy touting Merkel's Germany as "model for the West" for its newly-acquired "diversity," the country is sinking ever deeper into a social, economic and demographic bog. With their collective heads buried in sand, many in the establishment and the media seem to want the rest of the Western world to follow Germany's example by opening their borders to unregulated mass immigration. Sadly, the current result of Germany's open-door policy indicates that all those rosy reports seem to have been nothing more than an elaborate campaign of deceit or misinformation.
Vijeta Uniyal, a journalist and news analyst, is based in Germany.
