The number of Croats living in Germany who receive financial aid from the state is small.

When people speak about the status of migrants and foreigners in general seeking a new life in Germany, the most common negative assumption is that most of them live off social assistance money received from the state, reports Večernji List on June 4, 2017.

However, the data of the German Federal Labour Agency show that it is not so and that it is not possible to generalise, especially when it comes to Croats living in Germany. The figures show that only 6.3 percent of Croats living in Germany receive social assistance through the so-called Hartz IV program, which is the least among all groups of foreigners living in the country, and a smaller percentage than even the Germans themselves, of whom 7.4 percent receive social assistance.

The data shows that 17,275 Croats and 4.1 million Germans receive financial assistance from the German state. Looking at the structure of other nationalities receiving social assistance, the first position belongs to Syrians and citizens of other Arab nations who have mostly arrived in Germany in the latest refugee wave.

The agency has announced that as many as 510,000 Syrians, or nearly 80 percent of them, live off social assistance, which is an increase of 173 percent compared to the previous year. They are followed by the Turks (276,000) and Iraqis (110,500). The Poles and the Romanians are at the bottom of the rankings, below Croats, but their percentages are twice as high as Croats’.

This data has, once again, confirmed what the Germans have been saying for decades, and that is that Croats are among the best workers in the country. They do not have the assimilation problem because they are culturally and socially very similar to Germans, and have no problem with learning the German language and adopting the lifestyle and customs of the society in which they now live.

The advantages above are usually the biggest problem for those who receive the greatest amount of social assistance, namely Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis and other peoples from the Middle East and Africa.