The Foreigner’s Contradiction
The Foreigner’s Contradiction
Musk campaigns for the AfD and needs more migrant workers at home.
The fascist ideology needs “the foreigner” for its chance at domination, the state needs “the foreigner” because its own labor force is no longer profitable enough. And capital needs “the foreigner” because he acts as a buffer between class consciousness and exploitation.
Reminder: The words marked in red are links leading to relevant critique articles.
This article is part of several analyses on fascism, how it works and is misunderstood. We recommend the following:
- “Is this fascism now?” – About the contentless “firewall” and the bland uniformity of bourgeois parties.
- “On right-wing radicalism” – About the logic of fascism and why AfD voters are not stupid but understandable.
- “Reversed antifascism” – About the futility of banning the AfD.
- “Deportations and Refugees” – About the fundamental contradiction behind deportation.
- “General critique page on right-wing extremism.”
Fascism is in fashion.
What was once the rambling chatter of older gentlemen in dark pubs a few years ago is now fully mainstream.
“These camel drivers should go back where they belong, far, far behind the Bosporus, to their mud huts and multiple wives. They have no place here”
That would have been disgusting enough 20 years ago, but in this case, it was said by the leader of the AfD parliamentary group in Saxony-Anhalt on Christmas Eve.
Looking at comment sections under any social media post revealing a crime or misconduct, you quickly find the herd of the “political center” smelling that the perpetrator is not just an asylum seeker, but should be deported.
When last week the CDU proposed that people should be deported after just two crimes, regardless of their nature, the applause from Merz’s CDU ranks was loud.
Franz Joseph Strauss apparently already knew that there need not be a party “to the right of CDU/CSU” — it all comes down to the same thing.
Despite this, last week’s outcry was huge when Tesla billionaire (and future president) Elon Musk seemingly wrote a guest article in “Die Welt” at the request of Springer chief Döpfner, describing the AfD as “the only party that can save Germany”.
Aside from the fact that the shock really surprised us; it’s Springer after all – so what did Musk tell the millions of readers of Die Welt?
“The AfD understands that economic freedom is not only desirable but necessary.
Their approach to reducing state overregulation, lowering taxes, and deregulating the market aligns with the principles that made Tesla and SpaceX successful. (…)
Germany has opened its borders to mass migration, which, while pursuing humanitarian goals, has led to significant cultural and social tensions.
The AfD advocates for a controlled immigration policy that prioritizes integration and the preservation of German culture and security.
This is not about xenophobia but about ensuring Germany does not lose its identity in the pursuit of globalization. A nation must preserve its core values and cultural heritage to remain strong and united. (…)
Although the AfD is labeled as far-right, it offers a political realism that resonates with many Germans who feel their concerns are ignored by the establishment. They address pressing issues without the political correctness that often obscures the truth.”
Of course, if one believes it’s right to continue calling “people with black skin also still Neger” (Thomas Seitz), to deport “Antifa to Buchenwald” (Mirko Welsch), and that the big problem in Germany is “that Hitler is portrayed as the absolute evil”, then Musk is right that the AfD tackles the issues without political correctness.
Beyond moral concerns about the AfD, which are objectively hard to judge, Musk’s support for the AfD is useful for examining the core contradiction behind the parties with fascist tendencies.
A party that sees itself as economically liberal cannot be criticized for not understanding the contradiction between capital and labor – but we can criticize them for not understanding their own demands:
How many people the AfD actually wants to “deport” is not stated, as that would be too simple for a fact check.
However, in the online shop “Patria” of the AfD youth organization, they at least boast about wanting to “deport millions”.
The “deportation offensive” of the AfD, which according to the notorious Potsdam meeting should also target “foreigners with German passports”, is obviously not legally feasible – but that can all change.
Skilled Workers and Other Delusions
The following will not address the moral concerns behind the political tendency to view refugees solely as human capital, but rather the contradiction from an objective economic perspective.
Various calculations show that German companies currently lack between 500,000 and 700,000 skilled workers to maintain the German economic level.
The “innovative capacity” of the German economy in the STEM sector (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) alone accounts for 308,400 unfilled jobs, according to the German Economic Institute (as of spring 2023).[1] Overall, Germany has about 1.8 million unfilled positions, with the number rapidly increasing.
“By 2035, due to demographic development, five million more Germans will go into retirement than young people will enter the workforce.”
Marcel Fratzscher, head of the German Institute for Economic Research, states that Germany needs a net immigration of at least one million people per year “to fill the gap left by the Baby Boomer generation in the labor market.”
The current state of skilled worker immigration, which both the AfD and Musk appeal to with their call for “controlled immigration”, is an idealism that signals the desire to keep out the “bad foreigners” while still benefiting from the “good ones.”
The AfD’s party program states:
“Immigration cannot solve the problems of the social security systems, which have arisen due to declining birth rates in Germany and will become more acute in the future; rather, these problems are exacerbated by the nature and scale of current immigration. We want to decide who comes to us and only allow qualified newcomers based on need.”
Both a points-based system and the de facto halt of immigration in the name of the economy are not based on facts.
The idea that only highly qualified immigrants can be profitably integrated into the labor market is incorrect.
Industries with low qualification levels (e.g., hospitality, construction, large parts of the service sector) face a labor shortage that far exceeds the “skilled worker” deficit.
“Germany does not need less immigration of low-skilled people, but more immigration of both low-skilled and (…) highly skilled people.”[3]
Politicians from all parties mention the acute personnel shortage in healthcare, even coining the term “care emergency”.
Even the AfD admits that the enormous staffing gap in healthcare cannot be closed without foreign workers.
They speak of a “staffing minimum” for care facilities, but simultaneously argue for only allowing “highly qualified” immigrants to enter Germany.[4]
Connected to the demand for skilled immigration is the instrumentalized fear of “immigration into social systems”, which all parties in the Bundestag (except The Left) exploit to justify their polemics about the “good” and “bad” foreigners.
This is at the core of the migration-fueled status quo and is used to mask the material struggles of working people:
The debate around the effects of migration on social systems mainly revolves around health, pension, and long-term care insurance.
Of the 40 million employed in Germany, 33 million are covered by statutory pension insurance[5]; the statutory pension system is based on a pay-as-you-go model.
This means the pensions of current retirees are financed by the contributions of current workers – a “generational contract” that is strained by demographic change.
Without immigration, the contributions to the statutory pension system would already be significantly lower, as Germany would have shrunk since 1974 without net migration.
Currently, each retiree has about two contributors; in 1962, the ratio was one retiree for six contributors – which is unsustainable. [6]
This trend continues today and will worsen as the large Baby Boomer generation retires in the coming years – or would, without immigration.
According to the German Federal Pension Insurance (DRV-Bund), federal subsidies and reimbursements amount to about 100 billion euros annually, roughly one-third of the required funding.[7]
The demographic shift is a consequence of the declining living standards for most Germans, and this trend will not stop in the foreseeable future – children cost money, and increasingly fewer people can afford them.
The problem in health insurance could theoretically be solved quite simply through fully tax-funded healthcare without profit-oriented health insurance, but that’s not the argument being made.
The biggest beneficiaries of immigration are the statutory health insurance funds (GKV).
The costs of GKV are rising year after year; in 2022, benefits reached a record high of 289.2 billion euros, with pure benefit expenditures around 247.2 billion euros.[8]
The largest costs arise from long-term care in retirement age.
Migrants are, due to their generally younger age, considerably cheaper to insure than the average insured person;
“This applies strongly to labor migration, but even refugee migration is likely to benefit the funds in the medium term if people are integrated into the labor market reasonably quickly.”[9]
The Foreigner’s Contradiction
Politically, the talking point “Unemployed refugees” who would rely on German social benefits has been prevalent for a long time.
And it is true that after five years, only about 50% of refugees are integrated into the labor market, and after 15 years, about 70%.[10]
Regardless of the fact that this is naturally due to bureaucratic hurdles for work permits for refugees, the remaining social benefits (compared to expenditures on pensions and health) are relatively low.
More significant are unemployment benefits and the “basic income for jobseekers” (formerly Hartz IV), which aims to secure the minimum livelihood for long-term unemployed, their families, and other eligible and needy persons.
Projections for 2024 estimate federal Bürgergeld expenditures to be around 38.7 billion euros.
Approximately 38% of Bürgergeld (or Hartz IV) recipients are “foreigners with migration experience” (as of 2022). As a counterpoint: without immigration, i.e., without “foreigners with migration experience,” the German economy would likely collapse as previously explained. [11]
Nearly half of working refugees work below the occupational level they had before fleeing – a find in all the jobs that are so terrible that fewer and fewer Germans want to do them. This is not polemics; precisely because of this, Germany needs the “labor in precarious jobs“.
Instead of assuming that “foreigners with migration experience” are lazy and inactive, the facts show: bureaucratic hurdles, unsuitable work below qualification levels, and societal resentment make many migrants’ work not only practically impossible but also, depending on their qualifications, humiliating – it becomes even more humiliating if they have to shop with their designated refugee payment card before starting work.
And that’s why the love of fascism among people like Musk, Müller, and others who have never worked a day for wages is so a contradictory but useful idealism – anti-foreigner propaganda benefits them greatly, because the scapegoat politics not only sells better but also dismisses any class consciousness.
But capital needs foreign labor not only because migrants are more likely to take on precarious jobs that domestic workers wouldn’t, but because demographic change inherently leads to a shrinking workforce.
Of course, these apparent problems are not real problems:
The development of productivity levels allows for a scenario where humans in Germany might not need to work at all – but unfortunately, profit maximization opposes this, so nothing can be done (Well, socialism).
As if Musk wanted to give us good arguments for this article, he now engages in a public X (Twitter) battle with the MAGA crowd to convince them that yes, foreigners are bad – but not if they work cheaply for Tesla.
According to an analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), Tesla filed 742 applications for the “H-1B” visa, more than double the 328 in 2023.
In 2024, a further 1,025 H-1B applications were approved for continued employment at Tesla.
Tesla, whose CEO himself worked under the H-1B program, and other tech companies have long used H-1B visas to bring qualified workers from countries like India, China, South Korea, and the Philippines to the U.S.
The industry continuously pushes to raise the cap on H-1B visas, currently limited to 65,000 new visas per year, with an additional 20,000 for individuals with a master’s degree or higher.
As in any other developed capitalist country, domestic labor cannot meet the demands of profit-driven corporations – this is an insoluble mechanism as long as there is the contradiction between capital and labor.
Meanwhile, the ruling elites exploit the “foreigners!” card because it best masks the fundamental issues of material existence for working people.
Like any other bourgeois ideology, even the most reactionary one, fascism, cannot explain the basic mechanisms of capitalism and thus wittingly or unwittingly repeatedly runs into political and ideological contradictions and dead ends – like a dog chasing its own tail – loud, frantic, aimless, and when it bites its tail, it cries.