Tuesday, February 9, 2021

Hanno Bachmann, January 28, 2021, Migrant Quotas in the Public Service

Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus, Plenarprotokoll 18/71, pp. 8455-8456. 

Right honorable Frau President. Ladies and gentlemen. 

The political left simply cannot get loose from their quota fixation. Scarcely has the unconstitutional parity law come down around their ears and there follows an even more absurd project: Migrant quotas in the public service. They thereby show that they have plainly not understood the function of the public services. 

The public service by no means has to illustrate the population true to scale, but it has to serve the community with the greatest possible efficiency, and thereof most of all the citizens, with or without a migration background.  Therefore, Article 33, ¶2 provides the established principle of the best selection [Bestenauslese] – I cite with permission of the President and especially in the presence of the appropriate Senator: 

Every German shall be equally eligible for any public office according to his aptitude, qualifications and professional achievements. 

We have this principle to thank that we have in international comparison a relatively good functioning public service, despite all the mismanagement at the political leadership level. It would be fatal if we turn this fundamental pillar of our community into a performance piece of your ideologically driven quotas project. 

You occupy yourselves with an allegedly discriminatory hiring practice whereby you, as already with the LADG [State anti-discrimination law], discredit as a whole the public employees of our city. In fact, there exists no basis for such a discrimination. Quite the opposite: For over 14 years, the general equal treatment law [AGG] also applies to the public services, which forbids, amongst other things, discrimination on account of ethnic origin and religion. On account of violations of the AGG, there has been in the last six years merely 36 complaints against the State of Berlin, of which so far just three complaints were successful – three complaints in relation to 123,000 employees in the public service. This number says it all: Of discrimination, there is not a trace. 

Frank-Christian Hansel (AfD): Right! 

Because a concrete discrimination cannot begin to be proven, as a supplement you take refuge in the generalization of a structural prejudice. Yet it is simply a clumsier error of reasoning to necessarily conclude a prejudice from a statistical under-representation. The real origins lie elsewhere, namely in a completely failed education and migration policy. Naturally, it is also the migrants who are those suffering from a decades-long failed SPD education policy. Yet nevertheless to say: We make such a miserable education policy that we now compensate with a migrant quota –, is, for all that, completely misguided. 

            Frank-Christian Hansel (AfD): Right! 

Who, with the best of will, admits people of a foreign culture and of far from educated classes, in a number not to be integrated, cannot seriously complain that these people find no employment in the public service. 

A new education and migration policy – that is the long-term and difficult and yet only way promising success; along which you do not want to walk, and instead lapse into a hollow symbol politics. 

            Stefanie Remlinger (Greens): As if you want to walk it! 

            Frank-Christian Hansel (AfD): We are doing it! 

            Stefanie Remlinger (Greens): Though you want to throw out all! 

In the direction of the Linke delegation, I say: Just for once implement your quotas for yourselves, before you fall upon the public service with that. 

When looking around me, I recognize in your regard exactly one member with a migration background. That is of 27 members a quota of less than 4 percent. Your delegation is biodeutsch, through and through. And you now present yourselves here and reproach the public service, that it discriminates, with its migrant of quota of 12 percent. 

Stefanie Remlinger (Greens): That is no reproach of discrimination in the administration! 

Here we have yet again: Leftist double morality pure. 

We know that in an election year primarily the Greens and Linke have migrant lobby groups breathing down their neck, those who have made it their life- and business-model to always and everywhere feel themselves to be discriminated against. The existence of these people cannot however now definitively be a reason for setting the entire public service on its head. 

I thus maintain: The Berlin Linke party and delegation are, measured by their own standard, a focal point of structural prejudice. The public service of our city is – particularly in Corona times – much too important for it to need bear the brunt as an experimental field for your even so absurd as unconstitutional quota experiments. 

The reproach that the hiring practice of the public service was discriminatory is false and is in its own way discriminatory. 

The origins of the statistical under-representation of migrants lie in a failed education and migration policy. We of the AfD stand for equal opportunity – Yes, exactly: For women, for migrants, for whomever, and we therefore directly reject any quotas rule. 

– Many thanks.   

[trans: tem]