A homeless immigrant man will continue to receive benefits and not be asked to find a job by the Ennepe-Ruhr district job center in Germany, as the office says the man is dangerous and should not be “provoked.”
The man in question is Amer G., a Syrian asylum seeker who reportedly arrived in Germany in 2015 and has become known in Witten for publicly reciting verses from the Quran using a loudspeaker.
For years, residents have complained about Amer’s loud recitations. According to reports, he walks through Witten’s city center on a daily basis, while reciting Quran verses, sometimes in the early morning hours. Police and the public order office have been dealing with the man for a long time.
According to the job center documents, Amer continues to receive €563 per month in citizen’s allowance as a single person. His current benefit approval period is scheduled to run until July 2027. He currently lives in a homeless shelter and therefore does not receive additional housing allowance. Yet despite receiving benefits, the man has reportedly not been invited to job search interviews for years. Support programs and concrete employment offers have also largely ceased.
The special treatment began with a memo dated August 7, 2023. Job center staff reportedly concluded that placement in employment appeared impossible because of Amer’s “background.” The decisive justification was that “potentially dangerous situations should not be provoked.”
The Syrian man was subsequently classified as “exempt from activation.” The reported arrangement means that Amer has largely been spared the standard measures applied to other benefit recipients, including regular appointments, training programs, and the requirement to actively seek employment.
Documents seen by German media outlets indicate that the concerns about “potentially dangerous situations” had already been raised before the August 2023 decision. According to the report, Amer’s probation officer contacted the job center three months earlier and reportedly asked that the man not be “provoked.”
The North Rhine-Westphalia Ministry of Labor has criticized the principle behind such an arrangement. The ministry stated that removing a person from active job placement solely because of a potential risk to public safety is “illegal and not provided for by law.”
For Amer, however, the arrangement has meant years of largely discontinued job placement efforts at the expense of the German taxpayer.