The president of the Federal Association of German Businessmen, Rainer Dulger, criticized the immigration and social policy of the traffic light. “Someone who has never worked in Germany cannot earn exactly as much money as someone who has worked here for 15 years and has paid social security contributions,” Dulger told “Welt.”

What Germany needs is “immigration into our employment systems, not our social systems.” Current policy establishes the wrong incentives.

Dulger says a 'significant proportion' of citizen benefit recipients are foreigners

In this context, Dulger called the payment card a “first step in the right direction.” But the problem is still big.

“We currently have 5.6 million recipients of citizen benefits, a significant proportion of whom do not come from Germany,” Dulger said. “And we have in total almost four million people on the citizen benefits system who can work – that is too many.”

Greens skeptical about payment cards

Only recently it became known that there was no agreement within the traffic light coalition on the introduction of the payment card. The Greens refused to take a clear position on the project.

Thuringia's Migration Minister Doreen Denstädt (Greens) also claimed that the payment card threatened to “discriminate” against asylum seekers. This shouldn't happen.