Saturday, October 7, 2017

The Numbers Story

It will be pushed off to be a page three story in Germany, but it's one of those things which you can speculate about.

In the last couple of weeks....the number of foreigners (non-German) on Hartz IV (German welfare payments) reached two million.  All time record.

Focus pieced the finance article up....short in detail but loaded with a couple of facts.

At the summer point of 2016, they were near 1.6-million....so they've added roughly 400,000 in the past eighteen months.  The highest ethnic group in this category?  Syrians, escaping out of the ISIS-war.

Turks made up 269,472.  Iraqis were further down the line with near 130,000.

What interested me was the total Hartz IV number (Germans and non-Germans)....just over six-million out of a 82-million population. 

What is generally believed by the experts in Germany is that from the Syrian crowd....half of them are believed to have job skills, crafts, or degrees....which can be made into a job.  It's just that it might take some period of time (maybe three years) to get the language ability and certifications to the right level.

If the ISIS war were to end, and the civil war business with Assad found a solution?  That's never discussed much in the open by German politicians.  I've had two or three conversations with Syrians and the general feeling is that the younger folks will stay in Germany, but older Syrians will return back to the home-land.

So I come to this interesting detail of the Focus story.  There's a 82-million population now in Germany, and officially...on the books....ten-million of them (Turks, Syrians, Greeks, Americans, Brits, etc) are part of the 82-million.  One out of every eight people you bump into....are not German.  Just something to think about. 

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