Roughly 1.1 million asylum seekers entered Germany last year. Most of them came after Chancellor Angela Merkel publicly adopted a welcoming stance in September.

Another 800,000 refugees would arrive this year, followed by some 500,000 in 2017, according to the Cologne Institute for Economic Research.

In order to lodge these new comers, the government will have to spend around 17 billion euros in 2016 and 23 billion euros in 2017, experts calculated.

Adding costs of language courses and integration efforts, the total public expenditure on refugees would amount to 22 billion euros this year and 28 billion euros in 2017.

“Despite high uncertainties about the number of refugees arriving in Germany, the cushion of the public coffer will be eroded little by little,” said the institute in a statement.

“In order to avoid, or at least minimize, new debts in most federal states and the federal government, a critical review of expenditure is required,” it added.

The German federal government decided to use its budget surplus of over 12 billion euros in 2015 to cover refugee costs. The move added concerns to critics who feared that the government would help refugees by sacrificing resources urgently needed to stimulate the sluggish investment, the greatest weakness to the economy considered by economists.

Supporters of the government’s refugee policies argued that the influx of refugees could help alleviate the shortage of skilled workers, a challenge faced especially by German small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), if the new comers could integrate into the labor market successfully.

German Labor Minister Andrea Nahles on Sunday said that refugees must work hard to integrate into the German society, otherwise their benefit payments would be cut.

They must earn their own living in a long run, Nahles wrote in an op-ed for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. “Those who did not do so will not receive our support permanently,” she warned. Enditem

Source: Xinhua