Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Germany's 67,194-Issue

N-24, a German commercial TV news network.....brought up the topic of refugee and immigrant unaccompanied minors this morning.

It's a short piece which drives home the simple statistic of a lot of kids in the refugees crossing the border.....having doubled in one single year.  The word "phenomenon" was used on two or three occasions in their description of the issue.

Right now....there are 67,194 total unaccompanied minors in Germany...under the welfare system of the government.  This means they have to appoint a guardian....cover the kid with all the necessary requirements in life....and closely supervise them.  No one says the total cost of this....but you can figure it's a home-like structure with one or two adults trying to monitor a couple of the unaccompanied minors.  You can do the math with every eight such minors, and come to realize that the government has to employ at 8,000 Germans in some capacity of a minor-home-supervisor.

N-24 suggests in their commentary that by the time you figure up the total costs of this situation....each single unaccompanied minor will cost a minimum of 40,000 Euro a year.

How the situation develops?  No one is saying these are Syrian or Iraqi or North African.  These sort of statistics don't get tossed around in public....for whatever reason.  My guess is that a 12 or 14-year old kid is standing there.....in a lose-lose situation, and boldly makes the decision to leave.  He gets the info....the route...and somehow comes up with the cash to make the trip possible.

What if the trend continues?  That would be a curious thing to ponder upon.  If you had another 20,000 such minors arrive in 2016....that's another 800-million Euro that the Germans would have to dig up....on top of the 2.6-billion Euro that they have to spend on non-German minors presently.  Just finding competent people to work the home environment itself will eventually become a problem.

So, it's another one of the one-hundred odd complexities added to the immigration and asylum deal....which make it more and more impossible to resolve or feel happy about.

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