As the immigration debate consumes America, a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor sheds light on somewhat similar issues in Germany.

When Germans join migrant field hands, the harvest suffers

BEELITZ, GERMANY ““ Instead of waiting for the next welfare check, Heino Wittstock is picking asparagus. The German construction worker has been unemployed for three years. But this spring, he joins some 280,000 Polish migrant farmhands, plucking the foot-high green and white sentinels from the rich Brandenburg loam.

“I need to do something; Sitting at home on the couch is not an option,” he says. In an unusual effort to address its 11.9 percent unemployment rate, Berlin is also trying to answer a common refrain in many industrial nations: “Foreigners are taking jobs away from us.” In Germany, the spring asparagus is harvested by migrant farmworkers. But the labor ministry has a new rule that says 10 percent of seasonal farmworkers should be German.

Yes, those job stealing Mexicans of Europe who speak a language with no vowels are at it again, taking work from deserving Germans. Yet…

And German farmers are angry, saying native-born pickers are only half as efficient as the Poles.Unemployed Germans lack both practice and motivation, farmers here say.”You can’t force people into work,” says Dietrich Paul, spokesman for asparagus farmers in the state of Lower Saxony, one of Germany’s biggest asparagus regions, “especially not this line of work.”

[...] An advocate for the jobless, Johl nevertheless is a realist when it comes to his trainees’ limits. “The average Polish worker can harvest up to 400 kilograms [881 lbs.] a day of asparagus,” he says. The average German, picks about 200 kilograms, he says.”The Germans get tired quickly. We’re happy to work more,” says Karolina Pawlak, taking a break from sorting asparagus at a farm not far from where Wittstock was working.

There are so many things wrong with this. As the article notes, the German government won’t tax these earnings and the unemployed Germans who pick asparagus will get to add the money to their monthly unemployment check. So, the German government has decided to not only intentionally lose tax revenue (which its in dire need of as the recent tax hike shows) but also to allow these people to earn on top of their unemployment money. Instead, the government should take the total amount earned and deduct some percentage of that amount from their unemployment checks so that the government saves money but that the workers still get something out of their work.

Most importantly, this should not be a choice. While it’s clear that Germans are simply poor field workers (as Americans also would be), the government shouldn’t be passing ethnic quotas on jobs but instead forcing the unemployed to accept any work, regardless of what it is, or have their unemployment money cut. Perhaps most disturbing is an ethnic quota for workers picking asparagus, some kind of bizarre reverse affirmative action. Then again, the idea that the best qualified should get the job isn’t something Germans find as important as Americans do. The results speak for themselves.

NOTE: Somewhat off topic, as small cultural note, the Germans are crazy about their Spargel, or asparagus. In fact, right now we’re in Spargelzeit, or Asparagus time/season. Restaurants create their own Spargelmenü, an asparagus only menu which one receives in addition to the normal menu. Asparagus is also sold openly on the street and offered in almost every restaurant. Lastly, they are after the white asparagus, which is prized and supposed to be far superior to the green variety. And you thought the Germans only had a strange fascination with Sauerkraut, think again!

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