Why is the Green Party using activist front groups to subvert the law and allow refugees to convert government benefits into untraceable cash?

This post is about a small and ominous riddle that has bothered me for some time.

First, some background:

The rickety German fiscal system has been groaning under the pressure of mass migration for a long time. Welcoming hundreds of thousands of unemployed foreigners into your country is expensive, particularly because the Federal Republic imposes upon itself the duty to provide all of these newcomers a monthly allowance. Single adults get 460 Euro and married adults get 413 Euro per month, and if any children are living with them they get much more. The cost of this allowance and other services provided to asylees, like housing, runs to the multiple billions every year.

Our refugees transfer a significant part of the money they receive back to their home countries. In 2023, these transfers amounted to an estimated 6.81 billion Euros. In this way and others too, Germany has become a financial resource for large parts of the developing world. The global south must merely send some of their people across our borders to harvest our naive humanitarianism.

Last year, this state of affairs began to annoy a great many people, and various jurisdictions resolved to stop giving asylees cash and provide them with prepaid debit cards instead. Refugees can use these cards to buy food and other necessities, but they cannot so easily send the money that is stored on them back to their native lands. They are allowed to withdraw only 50 Euro a month from these cards in cash. In Bavaria, payment cards are now a state-wide standard.

Now the riddle:

When the payment cards were first being debated, a great hue and cry arose from the left in general and the Greens in particular. At first I wrote this off as typical whinery, but they were so exercised that it began to seem very strange. In February I attended an Antifa protest in Dresden, and was surprised to hear multiple speakers railing against the inhumanity of the payment cards. It got me thinking about the imponderable financial entanglements of all these leftist groups, and all those billions of Euros that the German government is pouring into the hands of ostensible refugees in return for nothing at all. Who benefits from the asylee allowance and who stands to lose from the stricter control of this money, aside from the refugees themselves?

This brings us to an amazing piece of investigative reporting that Junge Freiheit published at the start of this month. They discovered that left-wing organisations with connections to the Greens are circulating flyers among refugees in Bavaria, which provide instructions on how our indolent recipients of government benefits can convert the value of their prepaid debit cards back into cash:

As you can see, these flyers advise refugees to betake themselves to major supermarkets and buy 50 Euro gift cards, or vouchers. Then, they can take these gift cards to various fly-by-night exchange centres, where our leftist activists promise to coordinate their sale for an equal amount of money. Here are a bunch of refugees lining up outside of the Regensburg Green Party office to do precisely this:

Photo from Junge Freiheit.

Gift cards are, of course, worth slightly less than their nominal value, so somebody is going to no little expense here, all for the purpose of increasing the amount of untraceable cash refugees have in their pockets.

The activists running the exchange centre are happy to sell the gift cards they buy off the asylees to absolutely anybody; they even offer to sell them to the journalists from Junge Freiheit when they show up undercover:

… [W]e return to the Green Party office at 4 p.m. and witness revealing scenes. A long line of immigrants has formed in front of the now open office door … A good hundred people willing to exchange have lined up. … [It is] the end of the month, and their payment cards have just been loaded with fresh money from the treasury.

We go directly to the office door and look inside the room … A light is on a little further back in the room. A woman with strawberry blonde hair, about 20 to 30 years old, is ensconced behind a desk. We knock on the window. The woman looks up. Somewhat reluctantly, she gets up from her chair. Instead of the door, she opens the window. It’s a precaution, she says; recently, there’s been a series of “hostilities” against the Greens …

On the table is a laptop set up to help them check the vouchers for validity. “Do you have to queue with the migrants to buy a voucher?” we ask the two of them. “No, for God’s sake, we’re happy for every buyer.” They roll out the green carpet for us in joyful anticipation of new cash. In fact, we are the only buyers, except for a woman who, just as we came in, also asked to buy two vouchers for 100 Euro.

We bypass the queue and go directly to the employee, who digs out a whole portfolio of vouchers, which he now offers to sell us.

While the operation is run partly out of Green Party offices¹ and managed by the Regensburg Green Party political director Burkard Wiesmann, the Greens have done everything to avoid attaching their name to the effort. Formally, this campaign to subvert Bavarian law is coordinated by a shadowy organisation calling itself the “Citizens’ Initiative for Asylum,” which has local chapters in Regensburg and other cities (we encountered these guys once before at the plague chronicle, in this post). Here we find our citizen asylum enthusiasts begging supporters to buy up their overpriced gift cards and admitting that their “exchange fund” is running low on money. As the demand for refugee gift cards is clearly unequal to refugee demand for cash, one wonders how this fund was established in the first place, and how it is maintained. Our activists are also very unclear about why, exactly, it is necessary to increase the cash available to asylees, pleading only vaguely that it is about freedom and that the payment cards often “don’t work.”

The Bavarian CSU, which spearheaded the payment card system in the first place, are naturally less than pleased about all of this. They want to criminalise these card exchanges nationwide via the Bundesrat, or the Federal Council. Meanwhile, our present Green/Social Democrat government are stonewalling, claiming in response to inquiries that they are “‘not aware of any specific cases’ in which asylum seekers use their payment cards to buy vouchers and exchange them for cash.” This is despite the fact that the initiative is all over the internet and even in the local press. Perhaps I will go to one of these card exchanges myself and report from direct experience, about this thing that nobody in government will acknowledge is happening.

All that remains is one burning question: Why is the Green Party, specifically, so interested in increasing the amount of cash available to refugees? And why are they so eager to disguise their association with these efforts? It smells through and through of corruption.

Over the summer, I wrote two posts about how the Green-controlled German Foreign Office was caught collaborating with asylum NGOs to grant entry visas to thousands of fake refugees with forged passports, including literal Pakistani spies. I don’t think that happens because of mere stupidity or incompetence. Mass migration has become a whole system – a kind of publicly-funded industry – in which a great many people, from leftist activists to establishment politicians, act in bizarre and openly corrupt ways under the cover of humanitarianism. It’s hard to pin down their motives, because so little of the migrationist system is understood.

1. An Antifa-adjacent “collective” called LiZe and something called the League for Free Thought also contribute office space, though it’s unclear how involved either group may be in the logistics of the operation.