Kitchen incentive for refugees to leave
Germany is offering asylum seekers new fitted kitchens, bathrooms and a year’s free rent if they go home, in the latest measure seeking to increase the return of refugees to their country of origin.
The cash incentive is marketed to refugees under the slogan ‘‘Your country. Your future. Now!’’ Immigration has become the main political issue as Germany tries to form a government after inconclusive elections.
Existing financial incentives of up to 1200 euros each for refugees to leave Germany will be topped up by 3000 euros for each family and 1000 euros for individuals if they voluntarily return home over the next three months. The cash can be used for rent or home renovations in a desperate attempt to persuade refugees to leave of their own accord.
‘‘When you voluntarily decide to return by the end of February, in addition to start-up help you can provisionally receive housing cost help for the first 12 months in your homeland,’’ Thomas de Maiziere, the German interior minister, told Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
Only 8,639 migrants participated in the return programme between February and October this year even though there are 115,000 eligible rejected asylum seekers. Refugee organisations have attacked the latest financial incentive as bribery and an underhand strategy to persuade asylum seekers to give up their rights in return for cash. ‘‘He’s trying to entice people to give up their rights in the basest manner,’’ Gunter Burkhardt, the head of Pro Asyl, said on Sunday.
The elections in September were dominated by immigration and the rise of the nationalist antiimmigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, leaving a weakened Angela Merkel still trying to form a new coalition government after the first round of talks collapsed last month over the refugee question.
Controversial measures to begin the deportation of Syrians – who arrived in their hundreds of thousands in 2015 – after the middle of 2018 have been tabled by regional governments controlled by Mrs Merkel’s conservatives.
The Bavarian interior ministry, one of the regional governments that supports the measure, told Welt am Sonntag on Sunday that Afghans who have been refused asylum tended to disappear days before their deportation flights. Instead of 50 Afghans at a time being sent home only an average of five people from each ‘‘collective flight’’ hand themselves in for deportation or can be found, an official said.
The nationalist hardliner Alexander Gauland was elected leader of the AfD on Saturday alongside the more moderate Jorg Meuthen, suggesting that the AfD will continue to move towards the anti-immigrant right wing. American plane dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
His defence secretary, General James ‘‘Mad Dog’’ Mattis, continued to talk in apocalyptic terms even after North Korea tested an H-bomb in September: ‘‘We are not looking to the total annihilation of a country, namely North Korea. But as I said, we have many options to do so.’’
Maybe Mattis just didn’t get the memo, but Trump’s own response on that occasion was less dramatic, and even rather gnomic.
Asked whether he planned to attack North Korea, he only said ‘‘We’ll see.’’
That is the response of a pokerplayer, not the berserker he often pretends to be.
It was striking, even from the start of his presidency, that Trump has never made specific threats with details and deadlines, and his tone has continued to soften.
After North Korea tested its first full-range ICBM this week, one that can reach any part of the United States, he just said ‘‘We will take care of it,’’ adding later that ‘‘It is a situation that we will handle.’’
This suggests that he knows there is nothing he can usefully do to stop these tests, and that he will just have to live with a North Korean nuclear deterrent.
He is clearly frustrated by it, and is often abusive about the North Korean leader – he called Kim ‘‘little rocket man’’ at the UN General Assembly in September – but he is now a long way from the there are no good military options available to the United States.
He’s not going to tell them that they are ultimately going to have to live in a state of mutual deterrence with North Korea like they already do with Russia and China, because his default mode is sounding tough.
But if he understands that himself, that’s enough.
Trump is ignorant and bombastic, but he is not stupid.
If his generals tell him the facts often enough, he can be persuaded to behave with appropriate caution.
He CANNOT be persuaded to tone down his rhetoric, especially the midnight tweets, so the sense of crisis will continue, but we may be safer than we think.
I would not be suggesting that Trump is privately willing to accept a rational accommodation with North Korea and live with their bombs and missiles if his evil twin, Steve Bannon, were still his Chief Strategic Adviser.
To Bannon, ‘‘rational accommodationism’’ is the worst crime of all.
But that’s why Bannon’s resignation was one of General John Kelly’s conditions for taking the job of White House Chief of Staff. Bannon is gone, and I think that Trump may now have secretly accepted reality. Of course, I could be wrong.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.