Welcome to Austria. Now go home.
After a stressful day yesterday, a few things become clear. Europe is sending the message to Ukrainians that if you cannot sustain an independent life here, you better go home or not come at all.
Yesterday we drove out to a village about an hour outside of Vienna with a film crew from ORF, Austria’s public television, to interview a family who arrived in Austria just over a year ago, having fled occupied Kherson region. The program will air in early November, and I will let you all know then where to watch it. I accompanied the journalists as a translator in the morning, and in the afternoon we returned back to Vienna, so they could film individual interviews with me and my fellow volunteer Jenia, who has become an unofficial expert in everything to do with mathematical calculations for Austria’s Grundversorgung and Zuverdienstgrenze bureaucracy.
Just as I was about to be filmed, already rather self-conscious as it had started to rain and I had rushed out for a quick Starbucks in the rain, no umbrella, no hair brush, no make-up bag, having left my apartment at 7pm that morning, and it was now 3pm and I realised I was not exactly camera-ready, I received a WhatsApp message. I made the mistake of opening it. It was from a refugee who has for reasons unclear to me been living in the Vienna “arrival center” hostel for some time. She told me the arrival center was turning away Ukrainians, saying Vienna was full, and suggesting people try Germany or Switzerland instead. She also told me about a family, parents and autistic child, who had just arrived, been told there was no space, but they could go to Graz. She said she gave the family my phone number (!) and told them I could help them with a taxi (!!). So just before I am due to go on camera, I reluctantly open my phone and begin to order a Bolt from the arrival center to the train station, as that Ukrainian mother was already texting me now too, beginning for help.
To be honest, I was boiling over with anger. At Austria for shutting its doors without properly telling Ukrainians about it. At the woman giving out my phone number as if it is somehow my responsibly to provide alternate transportation to refugees turned away by the state. At the rain for making me look like a wet dog. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the name of the Bolt drover — ex-Yugoslavia, that would mean they would be able to communicate with each other in some mix of Slavic languages.
I sat down to give the interview, TV lights in my face, conscious that the German coming out of my mouth was in no way grammatically correct and it felt in that moment like the hundreds of stories I have to tell disappeared somewhere into the back of my brain, and what came out was simple, human, frustration at a system designed for failure. If you ask the state for housing and basic aid, it isn’t enough money to live on. If you try and get a job to take care of yourself, you lose your housing immediately and/or are hit with a huge rent bill. The mathematics does not add up. And now Austria is full for new arrivals, but rather than making an official public statement, a government press release, we are just told to spread the message through Telegram channels, with lots of I’m sorry and we are working on it etc. To which I ask myself, what the fuck are any of us actually doing anymore?
We started as volunteers helping in a crisis situation at the train station. We solved immediate problems in front of us. Then we jumped in with Cards for Ukraine to try and provide a cash-equivalent first aid bandaid for refugees who had run out of money, not yet received any from the state, and didn’t have jobs yet. We have continued that for much longer than any of us could have imagined (huge shout out to Mario who just sent out another 144 cards on an entirely voluntary basis). Then I started a Telegram group as a way to share information and answer questions faster, realising I had accumulated the contacts of thousands of Ukrainians across Austria in my phone. The group is now nearly 3,000 people, all of whom at some point received a Hofer card from us, and is a helpful source of information and a place to ask any and every question, from why did my Klimabonus not arrive to will the grocery stores be closed tomorrow (yes).
However, now, my mood is different. If at the beginning, I felt like we as civil society were stepping in to fill the gap until the state got its act together, now it feels like the state is sending very clear signals to make life as uncomfortable as possible for Ukrainians in Austria (and not just, in Europe more broadly, too). So then I have evenings like last night asking myself what we as individuals are even doing. We cannot fight against a state that has made up its mind. We urge reform and for politicians to realise it is not possible to survive on €40 per month in organized housing where you are “fed” and instead things just get worse, not better. More on this in my last post here.
With the arrival centres being full, I truly feel like throwing in the towel. Yes of course we ask the Ukrainians to pass the message on back home that Austria isn’t really open anymore. But what makes me so mad is this is not our job. The government should at least come out and say it officially. Just like they should publish clearly the rules for how much you can earn legally in Grundversorgung. Or make an announcement that there is no more social housing. But they don’t do this, and instead let volunteers like myself and the NGOs on the front lines deal with the clean up. Then you start to feel like an idiot.
Last night a women wrote me that she needs housing in Vienna for her father, a cancer patient, and how to bring him here, and register him for health care, and I kind of lost my temper a bit (someone had told her I was the person to contact for these questions which also incensed me) because I never announced myself to be the welcome committee. I am just one volunteer who handed out grocery cards when I had them available. Nowadays I explain we are empty. I explain that if you want to come to Austria you really need to be able to find housing on your own, using the usual internet channels or via people you know.
Yesterday evening a Ukrainian sent me this video which is unfortunately only in Russian but basically outlines how many European countries are struggling under the weight of Ukrainian refugees here, who now make up something like 1% of Ireland and Germany’s respective populations. There are rumours countries like Norway and Switzerland are even offering cash payments to refugees to pack up and go home to Ukraine. I haven’t done the research to say if it is true or not, but I can say I would not at the moment recommend to anyone to come to Austria, even if you just fled a front-line town and lost your home. I think, especially for elderly who cannot work, it is better to stay in a safer part of Ukraine.
I understand Europe’s anxiety on a cerebral level. I know they look at the population of Ukraine, which is huge, at the war, with no end timeline in sight, and think, oh no, we cannot handle this. What I do not understand is still hanging up Ukraine flags and saying #standwithUkraine etc instead of being honest and upfront about what countries can and cannot provide under the EU temporary protection directive. It also makes me upset that Ukrainians are essentially discriminated against here in Austria, with a permanent Grundversorgung status and no claim to Mindestsicherung (hence the petition).
The Ukrainian we met yesterday made friends with a Syrian family in the original dorm where she lived. That family, once their asylum was approved, they moved to Vienna, where they now receive €850 per adult and €450 per kid and have three years to essentially learn German and find jobs, as it was explained to me. One can argue three years is way too long and there should be incentives to get much sooner into the job market, and achieve financial independence, but it is so frustrating when Ukrainians are trying to survive here on a tiny fraction of this, and are then prevented from getting legal jobs to try and build for themselves an independent life.
A few days ago I received a panic phone call from, I’ll call her Svitlana, in Burgenland. She is living in an apartment in a church provided by Caritas. So social housing. Her husband took some kind of low-paying job that is within the limits of how much they can earn and not lose their Grundversorgung. Svitlana was introduced to a job by an Austrian. She worked for three days. Physical labor, packaging things and was then promptly fired on the spot when they discovered she could not operate a forklift. She explained she needed training. They say they could not train her. She was let go. And now she is in a panic that as a result of those three days she might lose her payments. I explained she must submit ASAP the piece of paper that she had been fired. She said she would, and then began to ask me what to do. “If I find another job, we could lose our apartment, and I will never have enough money to pay for a three-month deposit to rent an apartment on our own.” I end up having to bite my lip and say, you know what, you probably should just look for odd jobs that pay a little cash, so you can have enough to live on but not lose what you have. She asked me about training courses. Forget it, I said. You won’t be given access to all the education offered to local unemployed. Your status here doesn’t allow that. She thanked me, and hung up, despondent.
Later that day I received a message from a Ukrainian who speaks totally fluent English and due to health reasons (difficult to manage diabetes) needs an office job rather than manual labor. He is super frustrated that he cannot find anything, not even a part-time position in which English would be the working language. He has visited various NGOs and AMS to ask for help in finding a job. They try to send him to Sprachcafe (language practice) and German classes. He says, German classes sounds nice but right now I really need to earn some money. He and his mom rent a very modest small apartment with the €330 subsidy from the state. After they pay their utility bill, there isn’t much left for anything else. He wants to find work without risking losing what they have. I end up saying the same thing: maybe it’s time to think about tutoring or other things you can do on an unofficial basis to supplement your income.
And then you have the poor souls who told the authorities in Austria about sources of income in Ukraine, everything from a bit of online work for €150 per month to a senior pension of €70, and are now being told to pay back this entire amount to the Austrian state from the moment they entered the country and asked for Grundversorgung, at the rate of €50 per month. I really have no words for this. Jenia thankfully in her interview yesterday did a brilliant job of explaining how this works in practice. It is all so maddening and such a waste of salaried employee resources working for organizations that still have not managed (as a matter of choice) to put these rules anywhere in writing. These announcements come out of left field and take everyone for surprise.
When you compile all this information, you can only draw one logical conclusion: Austria (and other EU countries) is sending a clear message — do not come here unless you can support yourself. Which I suppose is fair enough but it only applies to Ukrainians, not to the other asylum-seekers, who are offered a chance at a decent life here once their cases are approved. Is that because it is so much harder to reach Austria from Syria than from Ukraine? Why not say the quiet part out loud? Why keep it a secret? Why pretend to be open and helping and then in practice do the opposite?
I have to really spend some time thinking about where to go from here because I feel like I am not really helping anyone at the moment and we as volunteers cannot go up against a state that has made up its mind and is working at every step of the way against us. Perhaps I should just focus on a Christmas charity project for the kids. I do not know. We have been invited to speak at an open discussion in Vienna on November 9, and I will share that information once I have it. As I told the organisers today, who knows what I will have to say by that point.
Things are changing on a daily basis, and not for the better.