Stop the Payment Card!
The discriminatory payment card is given to all refugees receiving benefits under the Asylum Seekers Benefits Act - since 2025 also in Heidelberg, Mannheim, and the Rhein-Neckar district. The payment card is nothing but right-wing populist symbolic politics, serving racist prejudices and further marginalizing, discriminating, and controlling those seeking protection. There is an attempt to continually restrict the lives of refugees and to insulate Europe from the Global South. We resist the restrictive payment card and want to make solidarity a practice!
Why do we oppose the payment card?
The payment card massively restricts asylum seekers in their daily lives. Although the payment card outwardly resembles a VISA card, its applications are significantly limited. In many regions, including Baden-Württemberg, affected individuals can withdraw only up to €50 in cash per month. In addition, the card only functions in specific stores. Shopping in small stores, markets or flea markets, as well as participating in cultural events, is made significantly more difficult or impossible. Furthermore, there are high bureaucratic hurdles, as every new transfer or direct debit requires approval from the competent authority. Everyday financial decisions thus become an administrative act. We therefore see in the payment card:
1. Disempowerment of the affected: Refugees are restricted in their daily lives and cannot freely decide where and how to shop. A thrifty and self-effective lifestyle is prevented, for example, because affordable shopping options such as second-hand stores, exchange or used goods markets can often not be used.
2. Restriction of religious freedom: To adhere to halal or kosher diets, people need specially certified products from stores where payment with the card is often not possible.
3. Discrimination and social exclusion: Refugees are treated as second-class citizens with the payment card, preventing participation in social and cultural life.
4. Violation of personal rights: The payment card makes a person's residency status evident when shopping. This can lead to stigmatization and the risk of exposure or hostility in everyday life.
5. Racial control and data protection issues: The payment card provides the state with extensive insights into the finances of the affected and serves as a control instrument. Although authorities formally have no right to examine expenses in detail, we are already aware of multiple cases in Heidelberg where this occurred. For additional cash withdrawals or transfers, affected individuals must submit justified applications, even though these reasons are none of the authority's business.
6. Additional problems: The issuance of the payment card causes significantly higher costs and more administrative burden for the federal states and municipalities than the previous cash distribution - although its introduction was supposedly intended to simplify matters. The waiting times for approving applications for more cash or a transfer can be very long. Direct debits fail, benefits do not arrive, or must be actively collected.
7. Illegality: The blanket limitation of cash for asylum seekers to €50 is demonstrably illegal. Refugees already receive social benefits below the subsistence level, and now their access to cash is being massively restricted.
8. Risk of expansion to other groups: Refugees effectively act as a "test group". In the future, payment cards could also be used for other groups receiving social benefits. This expansion is already emerging in Hamburg, which would mean further normalization of surveillance, control, and restriction of social rights.
Supporters of the payment card often argue that it serves to prevent transfers abroad. In reality, however, only about seven percent of refugees transfer money abroad at all, and most of these individuals are working. The maximum €441 per month in social benefits that refugees receive is simply not enough to send significant amounts abroad.
The massive restrictions on the livelihoods of refugees, the obvious illegality of the blanket cash limit, the problems with its introduction, and the high bureaucratic and financial effort are not oversights but politically intended or consciously accepted. The aim is to make life in Germany as difficult as possible for refugees to deter people from fleeing. In this logic, supposed "pull factors" are to be reduced. However, in migration research, the model of push and pull factors has long been considered insufficient, as the reasons for flight and migration are extremely complex and multifaceted.
The arguments for the payment card are therefore merely pretexts. The supposed problems the payment card is supposed to solve simply do not exist. It is nothing more than right-wing symbolic politics and seamlessly fits into a racist isolationist policy of recent years. The payment card promotes racist prejudices, normalizes distrust towards refugees, and caters to a regressive desire for authoritarian control.
For us, it is clear: A system based on exclusion, control, and discrimination is not "in need of reform" but fundamentally wrong. We oppose this policy politically, in solidarity, and practically. With solidarity exchange markets, we concretely support refugees in overcoming the massive restrictions imposed by the cash limit.
What are we doing about it?
Because we will not silently accept the exclusion and control of refugees and want to show solidarity with those affected, we organize exchange actions throughout the region.
The principle:
- People with a payment card buy a shopping voucher in the supermarket
- In the voucher exchange, they receive the voucher value in cash
- People without a payment card in solidarity receive the vouchers in exchange for cash
If you click on "Heidelberg" or "Mannheim", you will see where you can exchange in the respective city.
How can you support?
Feel free to contact us and/or come to our meetings if you...
- want to contribute your own perspectives
- want to support the organization of the exchange markets
- want to take on shifts at the exchange market
- can provide us with premises
- are organized in premises and are willing to issue shopping vouchers
- can collectively buy shopping vouchers from us, e.g., for your shared apartment, house project, association...
- want to contribute to a nationwide political campaign against these racist attacks
- want to support legal action against the payment card.
- want to get to know us or have questions.
We also rely on donations. For the exchange actions, we need a financial buffer. Additionally, we need some money for materials like flyers or posters, small purchases like lockable cash boxes or barcode scanners, or room rentals for information events. Donation receipts can be issued.
Should the occasion arise that the financial buffer is no longer needed, it would be donated to the following organizations:
This means your donation will always do good.
For a world of solidarity!
How do regional structures look?
There are already initiatives in many cities against the payment card and exchange initiatives like ours. We are part of a nationwide network "Equal Social Rights for All!" (Website, Instagram)
Looking for an exchange opportunity in your city? An overview of all exchange initiatives can be found here.
Further Information
- Scientific Assessment of the Payment Card
Flüchtlingsrat Baden-Württemberg - Fewer and fewer rights for refugees
Flüchtlingsrat Baden-Württemberg - What you need to know about the new payment card for refugees
Landtag Baden-Württemberg