So, here's the thing on reducing welfare payments to foreigners.
By creating a two tier welfare system you are effectively creating a situation where immigrants are far more desperate to find work, and, as a result, far more likely to accept appaling working conditions than "natives" - flat out rejecting welfare for newcomers would only exacerbate this.
Seems to me, this is a form of social dumping that is mainly going to benefit the patronat, at the expense of the rest of the country - and will push down salaries and working conditions even further.
So, expected for a right wing government.
I do not agree with this: The cuts to welfare payments for foreigners are planned to encourage illegals and economic migrants to leave the country and to send a signal to the rest of the world.
Welfare payments to foreigners should not be an entitlement, you should rather earn it. I'd be even tougher than ÖVP+FPÖ on this issue and would only grant any welfare payments to foreigners after 10 years of legal stay in the country, no crimes committed and 75% of the period in employment. People who come to the country need to stand on their own feet and contribute to that country's development before claiming money.
You as a Swiss should know how this works: welfare payments in Switzerland are quite a bit lower than here (adjusted for the high wage levels and more in line with Upper Austria actually) and just in September the city of Zurich had a referendum in which a majority voted in favour of scrapping welfare payments for recently arrived foreigners from about 800€ per month to just 300€ per month. Yet unemployment in the country is low, even among foreigners. Why ? Because the system does not allow "welfare magnetism" and encourages tax-paying employment rather than dependency.
We'll definitely need to get rid of that silly, utopian welfare magnetism for foreigners and make clear that this is only for native people and especially those native people who have paid into the system for years - rather than for people who just come and pick and choose and think they are entitled to something ... These people have no place here.
And yet, Switzerland has substantially higher levels of immigration than Austria; so if the intention of lower welfare payments is to discourage foreigners from coming to Austria, it isn't going to make a difference. (immigrants are precisely encouraged to come to Switzerland because of the high wages)
Probably, a better indication of what a two tier welfare system will get you is by looking at the fact that the
frontalier cantons (Geneva, Neuchatel, Ticino) are the cantons with the most significant unemployment (and often lower wages), even though they are all among the richest cantons on a GDP per capita basis. The fact that
frontaliers living in Italy or France, with lower wages and cost of living; means that employers can get away with paying lower salaries to people who are much more willing to take them. That is exactly what you will get in Austria if you make one segment of the population more desperate than another.
(I think the solution to this is by introducing a minimum wage, and making employers, rather than French communes, responsible for the lost-tax refund; intead of cracking down on G permits, but that is a different issue)
