Foreigners may only account for 15 per cent of people living in Germany, but data gained by the right-wing Alternative for Germany party shows many names that might be associated with migrant-heritage communities feature disproportionately in unemployment welfare recipients.
The Alternative For Germany (Afd), the right-wing populist party that is now the second-largest in Germany and the official parliamentary opposition, has figured out a useful way to glean some extra insight from government data that by design or not can tend to obfuscate the degree to which society is being impacted by migration. While German law demands a certain degree of anonymity for citizens, forenames are not subject to this protection and the party has yet again managed to force the state to publish the frequency with which certain names appear in official statistics, this time looking at those receiving unemployment benefits.
Called Bürgergeld — ‘citizen’s money’ — unsurprisingly for a country where at least a four-fifths of residents were born in Germany and are at least passport Germans, the top names for unemployment payments are typical German names. Michael comes in first with 19,200 claimants out of 5.5 million recipients nationwide, followed by Andreas at 16,00, Thomas at 15,600, and Daniel at 14,800.
Yet many other names appear to have obviously non-German roots, suggesting recipients may be either naturalised migrants or the descendants of migrants which retained their heritage culture rather than assimilate into German culture after arrival. Matching with the largest groups to have recently arrived in Germany, many names in the top 14 appear to be disproportionately of Ukrainian or Arab heritage.
Among those listed with clear Ukrainian or Russian roots are Olena at 14,400, Oleksandr at 12,000, Tetiana at 11,400 and Iryna at 10,600.
They feature alongside first names like Ahmad at 13,700, Ali at 13,500, and Mohammad at 12,500 welfare claimants.
Despite it already being known that around half of Bürgergeld claimants are not, in fact, German citizens the left-leaning German media editorialised their coverage of the first name data to attempt a dunk on the AfD, asserting because names like Ali or Mohammad don’t quite come in first place, this disproves the party’s assertions about the rapid change of German society.
Nevertheless, as previously reported by German broadsheet Die Welt, the number of unemployment benefit receipients being foreign citizens is actually soaring, having gone from 20 per cent of claimants in 2010 to 47 per cent by 2023, the most recent year for which there is complete data.
In all, 12.8 per cent of all claimants are Ukrainian refugees and the rate of foreigners getting Bürgergeld rose in taht 2010-2023 period considerably faster than the increase of foreigners in the general population, which rose from nine to 15 per cent. As stated by the AfD, it is a situation that gives the impression of migrants travelling to Germany to join the dole queue, not the labour force.
As stated by the party last month: “What truly lies behind the citizen’s income is a colossal state self-deception – at the expense of the hardworking population. Almost half of all recipients do not hold a German passport, many have never contributed even a cent to our system… For Syrian recipients, the state now spends as much as it does on the entire federal police.”
The party said were they to enter government, the system would be totally rebuilt so the Bürgergeld benefitted Germans who had worked but fallen on hard times: “Those who refuse or have never contributed anything will no longer receive benefits – and must leave our country.”
The Bürgergeld release is not the first time the AfD have been able to use the prevalence of first names as a proxy to better understand how migration impacts society. As previously reported of the utility of this sort of research to add colour to official government statistic releases:
[the list of forenames] underline again the obfuscating effect of handing out large numbers of passports to newcomers when trying to understand emerging criminal trends. While this method of inferring migration background from forename is not totally precise, it has been used before in bids to get a clearer look at reality in a system which by accident or design restricts real data on immigration and crime.
As reported last year, the release of a list of the forenames of all men suspected of gang rape crimes in one German state starkly illustrated what was claimed to be a predominance of migrant-heritage suspects. “A clear trend is evident”, it was stated.
A similar approach was tried by the University of Copenhagen in Denmark in 2015, which found the top-ten criminal forenames in the country for men were all at the time of “Arabic origin”.
In September 2024 the AfD acquired a list of all forenames of gang rape suspects in one German state. They said it suggests “a massive 76 per cent of suspects are of foreign heritage”. Months later in January 2025 leaked names of all individuals arrested over the rioting on New Year’s Eve appeared to have the same impact, with a German news portal asserting that “the majority of the German [citizen] suspects clearly have a migrant background”.
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