Citizens’ Income

An example of this interplay between harsher discipline at the local level and its translation into federal policy can be seen in recent proposals by SPD labor and social affairs minister Bärbel Bas to reform the citizens’ income, introduced in 2023. Originally intended to improve access to subsistence benefits and provide all-around support, it is now being subjected to tougher sanctions and stricter conditionalities.

To justify this, Bas has emphasized the need to combat undeclared work and to hold accountable those allegedly involved in the “organized abuse” of benefits. Also questioning the freedom of movement of European Union migrants who claim such allowances, Bas has called for more effective data sharing between authorities on who is using this right. She wants to expand the mandate of the immigration authorities to detect and prosecute cases of “abuse of freedom of movement.”

Bas’s statements echo the long-standing agenda of the SPD in Duisburg, a city of half a million people at the meeting of the Rhine and the Ruhr. In particular, it reflects the approach of the city’s mayor, Sören Link, also of the SPD, who has gained nationwide fame as one of the most outspoken critics of freedom of movement, often peppering his rhetoric with unapologetic anti-Roma notes.

As early as 2013, Link played an active role in the German Association of Cities in shaping the discourse on “poverty migration,” which casts Bulgarian and Romanian migrants — especially Roma and other minorities — under suspicion of welfare abuse and portrays them as a central threat to social peace in disadvantaged cities. At the municipal level, this shift led to the consolidation of a securitized approach to migration that legitimizes punitive measures across key areas like welfare, housing, and labor market access.

In Duisburg, the “poverty migration” discourse — discredited by empirical evidence showing that migrants’ social security contributions exceed the social transfers paid to them — experienced a preelection renaissance. Mayor Link and neighboring municipalities today demand further restrictions to freedom of movement and criminalization of benefits claimants. In January 2025, Link took his demands to Brussels, calling for changes to the EU’s primary law in order to limit freedom of movement to those in full-time employment. While the previous federal government dismissed such proposals as both “dubious” and legally unfeasible, the new coalition’s governing agreement did include a commitment to legislative moves to combat s“welfare fraud.” The flashy raids that Link conducted in the first half of 2025 under the label of combating “social fraud” in “problem housing” estates have been used to further legitimize Bas’s recent attacks on citizens’ allowance recipients and alleged “mafia structures.”

Unlike during the COVID-19 pandemic, when migrants from Eastern Europe were in the spotlight mainly as “workers,” contributing to key economic sectors under extremely precarious conditions, today we are seeing a decisive rightward shift in the public debate. Eastern Europeans’ fundamental role in the low-wage sector has been erased, and instead they have been reframed through a lens of suspicion and criminalization, portraying them as social threats rather than citizens bearing rights.

A Two-Tier Labor Market

Bas is herself a former trade unionist and a Duisburg local who knows firsthand how postindustrial decline has impacted job security in the region. It might be imagined, then, that she would advocate for working-class rights and basic employment security for all workers. Such expectations have so far proven misplaced.

Instead, her reform proposals not only sideline but actively penalize workers in the most precarious and deregulated sectors, by effectively cutting their access to vital social support. This makes them both more vulnerable to hyperexploitation and potential targets of criminal prosecution. Thus, willingly or not, Bas accepts and reinforces a two-tier system that creates a significant disparity between the job security, wages, and employment conditions for permanent, native, or better-established employees and those on temporary or fixed-term contracts. These latter are disproportionately migrants, concentrated in low-wage sectors, such as cleaning, construction, logistics, meat processing, and warehousing.

This structural divide is the reality for thousands of Eastern European workers. One is Smail V., a temporary cleaner in Thyssenkrupp Steel Bruckhausen in Duisburg. He has spent the past five years performing the same job — but juggling fixed-term contracts lasting from a couple of days to a maximum of six months. In the past four months, he has already switched between two temp agencies supplying labor to the factory, each time facing new probation periods, unstable schedules, nonpayment of wages, and the threat of sudden termination.

As a rule of thumb, cleaners are employed on fixed-term temporary contracts with no guaranteed minimum hours, and which can be terminated at any time. One widespread employer tactic is to pay social insurance for workers on a part-time basis, ranging from sixty to eighty hours a month, and pay the rest cash in hand. Requests for full-time contracts are routinely denied, with workers instead directed to the Jobcenter to make up for absent income. Additionally, employers use Jobcenter top-up jobs to increase control over workers; for example, they threaten to pay their monthly hours in full and thus terminate their eligibility in cases when workers refuse to perform dangerous tasks.

With an income insufficient to support a family of three, Smail V. has turned to the Jobcenter on several occasions over the years. However, intermittent periods of unregistered unemployment and missing payslips — added to employers’ lack of cooperation — saw his applications rejected. A year ago, his last application to the Jobcenter triggered an examination of his right of residence. During this review, the Immigration Office cited his low income and time out of work as grounds for initiating deportation proceedings, on suspicion of “immigration into the welfare system.”

Fortunately, thanks to adequate legal representation, secured through a Bulgarian-founded migrant support organization in Duisburg-Marxloh, the case was ultimately dismissed. Smail V.’s family has now surpassed the five-year threshold during which EU citizens who are in Germany solely to look for work are excluded from claiming social benefits. Yet they remain unable to make use of their social rights, due to the built-up stretches of unregistered residence and short return trips to Bulgaria when funds ran dry.

Cases like Smail V.’s show the unfoundedness of Bas’s and Link’s assertions that workers intentionally limit themselves to minimum-hour contracts to top up their income with benefits, or that they are falling prey to organized “mafia structures.” The real issue lies in the structure of the low-waged sector in postindustrial cities like Duisburg. As in the case of Smail V., precarious work is not a choice but a defining characteristic of a whole segment of the labor market. Large companies such as Thyssenkrupp use layers of subcontractors and staffing agencies to bypass regulations such as collective agreements, workplace safety rules, overtime limits, and social contributions. Yet current political debates mostly ignore the regulation of subcontractors and staffing agencies or the accountability of corporations outsourcing to them.

Bas’s proposals for excluding part-time workers from social benefits or further narrowing the definition of a “worker” under freedom of movement will likely have even more harmful effects. They will encourage employers to turn to new and more vulnerable target groups in the labor force or devise new informal strategies, such as falsifying employment contracts or registering jobs abroad. The government could instead have taken action on the structures that incentivize top-up employment, for instance by regulating umbrella companies such as Thyssenkrupp that employ “zero hours” and low-waged workers. This would mean reducing employers’ ability to shift risks onto employees, obscuring real working hours and underreporting wages to social security.

Local Disciplining Measures

In fact, the hyperregulatory regime that Bas and Link advocate already exists in places such as Duisburg. For years, such cities have served as a testing ground for repressive and disciplinary controls targeting migrant populations in their daily lives and routine interactions with authorities. Bas’s assertion that certain neighborhoods of Duisburg are well known for “benefits abuse” has been refuted by social scientists as lacking any empirical basis. This use of anti-immigrant tropes to vilify whole districts is, however, a common tool in urban policy debates, to design special-control measures for tackling problematic behavior on the basis of vague aspersions.

The central instrument of Duisburg’s ethnically motivated migration management is the forced evictions targeting Bulgarian and Romanian residents of “junk properties.” Since 2014, the city’s Taskforce on Problem Properties has used fire-safety regulations to justify unannounced evictions. To date, over two hundred buildings in four “hot spot” districts have been cleared, displacing more than five thousand people, including children and the seriously ill. No alternative housing is offered to the evictees, leaving them to fend for themselves by seeking shelter with relatives or returning to countries of origin.

Critics, including local initiatives and migrant support groups, accuse the city of fabricating danger to authorize legally dubious procedures and of pursuing a politically symbolic policy that deters the settlement of Eastern European migrants. These evictions stand in stark contradiction to Duisburg’s high vacancy rates and the fact that many cited deficiencies, such as wooden staircases, are common in older housing stock. Since the formal housing market remains inaccessible to people with Bulgarian and Romanian names, they are forced into substandard rentals in the informal housing market, where overcrowding, rent skimming, and fraud are rife. Instead of cracking down on exploitative landlords and intermediaries or investing in long-term solutions like social housing, the city punishes precarious migrants — exacerbating socio-spatial segregation.

In 2022, Smail V. and his family were among those evicted, leaving them homeless for months. They slept in their car, amid brief stays with relatives and friends, before they could find new housing. The eviction and subsequent deregistration by the authorities turned Smail’s life upside down: housing insecurity led to job loss, disrupted his children’s schooling, and delayed a critical surgery for his wife.

Backs Against the Wall

A 2024 study from the University of Duisburg-Essen on the living situation of Bulgarian and Romanian migrants demonstrates how local welfare authorities are also turned into agents of the municipal tactics of disciplinary control. Bulgarian and Romanian migrants here face significant barriers to accessing social benefits, particularly from the Jobcenter. Eligibility is contingent on producing an extensive list of documents — an excessive “duty of proof” that does not apply to German citizens and does not reflect migrants’ realities dealing with precarious and informal employment.

Combined with long waiting times and complex procedures, such practices function as repressive gatekeeping mechanisms that effectively deter or delay access to basic income support. Indeed, the claim often made by Bas and Link — that working just four hours per week is enough to qualify for benefits — doesn’t reflect the reality at Duisburg’s Jobcenter. There claimants face strict eligibility checks and much harsher restrictions when it comes to accessing in-work benefits, often resulting in delayed or partial payments that fail to cover basic living costs. Take the case of a Bulgarian-Turkish mother of two young children, whose husband lost his life in an industrial accident at Thyssenkrupp Steel. Despite having no access to childcare and caring for one child with a disability, she was told by the Jobcenter that the only way to receive income support was to drastically increase her weekly working hours.

The revived discourse on “benefit abuse” and “mafia structures” obscures the severe labor exploitation endured by migrant workers from Eastern Europe and the structural factors that perpetuate it. To frame migrants as either complicit in, or easy prey for, ethnically defined crime networks creates the misleading impression that the hyperexploitative conditions they face are aberrations in an otherwise smoothly functioning labor market and welfare system. It also serves as a convenient smoke screen for further market-oriented transformations of the welfare state, which will deepen the flexibilization of labor and widen socioeconomic inequalities — not only for migrant populations but for all of the structurally marginalized.

The recasting of basic social support as “welfare fraud” signals Germany’s decisive shift to the right. This means turning welfare from a mechanism for poverty alleviation and fair redistribution into an instrument of control and repression over populations deemed “undesirable.” Still, this gradual erosion of migrants’ social rights should not be seen solely as a strategy of exclusion but also as part of a broader process of commodifying a workforce made highly vulnerable to exploitation. Capital depends not only on labor but on the availability of labor that is easily exploitable. Repressive municipal policies that severely restrict migrants’ social reproduction — exposing them to homelessness, legal insecurity, and constant control and surveillance — are a major tool in perpetuating migrants’ socio-spatial segregation and exploitability.

In today’s Germany, foreign populations are treated as disposable — desired for their labor but despised for who they are. That this is also the fault of SPD politicians shows what German Social Democracy has become, marked by its abandonment of the working class and its increasingly xenophobic policies.