Angela Merkel's New Pay-to-Go Policy

They tried it in Germany and apparently it is not working. They tried opening the nation to Muslim refugees and asylum seekers and now they are backtracking.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel can read the polls. The German people have lost faith with her leadership. Occupying the moral high ground on immigration has made her a target. Her approval ratings have been dropping and she risks losing her job in the upcoming elections.

So, she has reversed course. No more open-arms to refugees, no more ladling out mother-love to people who see themselves as an invading army. Merkel has just announced a new policy, which I will dub: Pay-to-Go.

Deportation creates a lot of bad press. Many of the countries from which the asylum-seekers hail do not want them back anyway. I don't understand why. So Merkel is proposing to pay them to leave.

The Daily Mail reports the story:

Angela Merkel will offer cash handouts worth millions of pounds for migrants to leave Germany in an effort to silence criticism of her ‘open-door’ border policy.

In a highly-embarrassing U-turn over the ill-fated plan, which saw 1.2million migrants flock to the country, Mrs Merkel has now vowed to send many of them home.

The German chancellor agreed a package of measures to speed up the deportation process for an estimated 450,000 migrants who have been rejected asylum.

The controversial plan, which marks a significant toughening of previous proposals, includes a £76million scheme that will offer migrants cash incentives to leave Germany voluntarily.

Many will see the move as a desperate attempt for Miss Merkel to claw back support ahead of her challenging re-election bid in September.

Criticism of her decision to leave Germany’s borders open and welcome all refugees during Europe’s migration crisis in 2015 has led to a surge in support for anti-immigrant parties.

As the old saying goes, desperate politicians do desperate things.

Of course, the new plan goes beyond pay-to-go:

The plans agreed by Miss Merkel will allow officials to analyse asylum seekers’ telephones in an attempt to verify their identity, while rules for detaining migrants will be widened.

The proposed crackdown, which has been criticised by human rights groups, will also include the creation of a department in Berlin to co-ordinate mass deportations.

Funny thing, human rights groups do not care about the victims of the crimes perpetrated by these refugees. And they do not much care about the fact that nearly none of them have jobs. Of the 1,200,000 refugees, 34,000 are gainfully employed. Many of them do not want to work, but many do not have the skills to do the jobs that are available. And they do not want to do the jobs for which they have the skills.

Merkel admitted that waiting for the refugees to depart voluntarily was not working. Thus, the idea of cash incentives:

Miss Merkel admitted that relying solely on migrants putting themselves forward for deportation would fail to tackle the huge backlog of rejected requests.

‘We rely heavily on voluntary departures, but we know that voluntary departures will not take place if people know that there is never a mandatory return to their home country,’ she said.

A lot of people believed that the Merkel policy toward refugees was the future. It seems that that is not the case. Who knew? And, by the way, has this story been reported in the mainstream American media?