The changing political environment in Germany has exhibited the commoditization of anti-immigrant discourse – and oddly enough, not just of the right wing. In the discourse of the government, under the former Social Democratic (SPD) chancellor Olaf Scholz, and currently the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) chancellor Friedrich Merz, the migrants have become hardened with the discourse surrounding low-wage workers and welfare recipients as possible fraudsters. What started as minor changes to the welfare and workforce systems in Germany has turned into a larger effort against migrants, and especially the Eastern European ones, in the name of struggling against social fraud.
Reforms on Income of Citizens and Welfare Mistrust
Social support was intended to be made more available with the implementation of the citizens’ income (Buergergeld) in 2023. But recent changes by leaders of the SPD, including the labor minister Bärbel Bas, have changed that mindset and tightened the sanctions and conditions. According to Bas, these reforms were required to combat organized abuse of welfare benefits and suggested the increase of the authority of immigration authorities to prosecute freedom of movement.
These suggestions resembled decades-old rhetoric on SPD-led cities such as Duisburg, where Mayor Soren Link has promoted an anti-immigrant rhetoric since 2013. The argument of poverty migration, as proposed by the discourse of Link, in many cases, focused on the Bulgarian and Romanian Roma, and has influenced the national policy. His city has led in retaliation: his city has restricted welfare, raided homes to find migrants, and has even spied on them, all in the name of fighting social fraud.
In January 2025, the limit was requested by the EU on freedom of movement by full-time workers by the EU by the call of Brussels by Link. Such actions have not always been taken as legally questionable, but are now increasingly finding a place in the policy agenda of Berlin, as the Merz-SPD alliance tries to come out as being tough on migration.
Low-Wage Workers Caught between Two-Tier Labor Systems
The crackdown of the government is mostly directed at the very employees supporting the low-wage economy of Germany, cleaners, construction workers, and warehouse employees. Employees such as Smail V., a Bulgarian cleaner in Duisburg, have spent years working on such temp contracts that have been unstable, with temp agencies providing services to such large companies as Thyssenkrupp. By such arrangements, employers can avoid collective agreements and social insurance payments, and the migrant workers are exposed to theft of wages and abrupt dismissal.
According to a social benefit application by Smail, he was instead suspected by immigration officials of abusing social benefits. This is the way that the state directs its attention towards the prevention of fraud and criminalizes the poor instead of regulating exploitative corporate activities.
The intention of Minister Bas to limit benefits to part-time or low-hour workers will lead to an increased separation of migrants into informality. In its turn, the employers take advantage of the fact that the line between employment and welfare dependency is blurred, and take advantage of the fact that state systems such as the Jobcenter allow the employers to control and punish their employees.
City Controls and Compulsory Resettlements
The experimental application of punitive local governance has found its way to cities such as Duisburg. The Taskforce on Problem Properties has undertaken mass evictions since 2014, pursuing fire-safety claims to displace more than 5,000 Bulgarian and Romanian residents. Homelessness was experienced by families, both with children and the sick. Opponents claim that the measures are ethnically directed; they do not eliminate poverty in the cities, but encourage Eastern Europeans not to come.
Migrants vacated by junk properties are constantly using cars or cramped, informal accommodation, which keeps them unstable. Although Duisburg has high rates of vacancy, the authorities of the city have concentrated on punishment and not on social accommodation or landlord regulation.
In a 2024 study by the University of Duisburg-Essen, the researchers determined that the process of obtaining basic benefits has become an obstacle course because of the disproportionate documentation requirements of migrants by their welfare offices. The delays and random rejections of Jobcenter are the gatekeeping strategies that practically deny the migrants their right to income support.
A Politics of Welfare to Control: The Right Turn in Germany
The renewed SPD discourse of labor exploitation (as abuse of benefits) hides the structural nature of exploitation. Instead of being victims of the underpayment system and precarious work, migrants are depicted as participants in the said mafia structures. This framing enables the state to turn welfare into a tool of social control as it turns poverty relief into surveillance and punishment.
The problem with this is not the migration fraud by the migrants, but the fact that it is a disposable labor force that is needed in terms of productivity, but is hated because it exists. This legalization of welfare use and conflation of welfare use and criminality has reconstructed social protection as a privilege and not a right by German policymakers.
The fact that the SPD was complicit in this rightward movement points to the fact that the party has lost its working-class background. Rather than protecting the disadvantaged, it has become a line of division between the deserving citizens and the undesirable migrants. Social democracy in Germany has been bound up in xenophobia and economic exclusion, as demonstrated by the rhetoric of Bas, the labor minister, and experiments in Duisburg, which are punitive rather than addressing corporate exploitation, which remains unchecked.
