After The Christmas Market Attack: Germany's Syrian Doctors And Liberalism’s Great Evil

Today in Germany there was an attack on Christmas Market by a Saudi doctor who apparently deliberately crashed his car into ethnic Germans doing their shopping in Magdeburg.

That makes this Deutsche Welt report, below, published in the wake of fall of the Assad Regime, which laments that the 6,000-plus Syrian doctors in the German republic may soon return home of their own volition seem really foolish.

This was portrayed as a universally negative thing for the German medical system and the experts DW interviewed practically begged Syrian doctors not to leave the country. Even still, when the reporters interviewed a Syrian doctor in Germany he mentioned he had not ruled out returning to his homeland. And so it bears repeating that the DW report was not painting this as a good thing for Syria (which needs doctors) or for Germany (which needs to undue decades of demographic damage), but instead was focused on the fact that Germany ‘relies’ upon the 6,000 Syrian doctors working in its medical system. This is ridiculous on multiple levels.

Principled nationalists everywhere are surely sympathetic with those professional Syrians who might want to return home – and most normal working class people are principled, pragmatic, nationalists for their own country. The nationalist AfD is polling as the second largest party in Germany and has been for more than six months while the anti-immigration leftist party BSW holds another 8% in the electoral polling. Parties that espouse German nationalism hold the largest share of public opinion in the country and yet Germany’s elite are lamenting the fact that some non-Germans may leave the country.

This position is only tenable if you have a fundamentally liberal worldview. A worldview that views a nation, any nation, has having no value beyond the GDP it is able to generate and the amount of money it is able to spend on ‘public services’. To the Western, and German, liberal those Syrian doctors became ‘new Germans’ the moment they stepped foot into Germany. It is worth noting that neither the Syrians nor more importantly the German public share this view.

What is particularly ridiculous in this DW pro-migrant propaganda piece is that it claims Germany is “reliant” on foreign medical professionals. What DW does not mention is that Germany, much like my own country (the UK), has a university system and set of public policies that prefer foreign students to German ones.

The German state has reserved 5% of all university spots for foreign students, specifically non-EU students—not French, English, or Dutch.

Some German states, such as Berlin, reserve an incredible 20% of places for foreign students by enshrining these requirements in law. German students are forced to compete not only the rest of the European Union for university spots their parent’s tax money funds, but they must also compete with the entire world for spots in their own universities. Additionally, these numbers do not count the non-Germans with German citizenship or residence (such as Syrian refugees) who are also competing for university spots.

As a result of these foreigner-first admissions policies the German state has managed to give away some 12,000 university spots to foreigners to study medicine. Those are 12,000 spots not given to Germans who might be interested in studying medicine. This has resulted, or at least partly resulted, in more than 7,500 German medical students studying overseas in international programs only some of whom return to Germany after completing their studies. Indeed, DW itself has a 2017 article covering the fact that a ‘shortage’ of university places at Germany’s medical schools is forcing future German doctors to study abroad, the article also covers the uniquely stringent criteria Germany places on medical school admissions.

On top of this already ridiculous set of circumstances, Germans who study abroad must also pay university fees, such as the 10,000-euro fees required by Polish universities for German medical students. These are fees that do not exist in Germany as the taxpayer (Germans) funds university education.

This ridiculous set of circumstances which could only come about by way of stereotypical liberal policymaking has resulted in German taxpayers funding the education of non-German students in German universities which many German children are unable to gain access to.

It is here worth noting that the United Kingdom has similar ridiculous policies regarding medical school places. The British government imposes caps on the number of university places it is willing to open to British students to study medicine. This policy is one of many that has resulted in a the ‘need’ for foreign-born and trained doctors to work in the British NHS, a ‘need’ that often serves as an excuse for continued mass immigration into the United Kingdom. This policy has also resulted in universities, such as the University of Central Lancashire, creating foreigners only medicine courses with very high fees. Fees that most British parents could never pay but extremely rich foreign parents may just pay in order to get a foot in the door to allow chain migration of a family into the UK by way of a child studying to become a doctor. Studying in a school a native Briton was effectively barred from.

The state of affairs is so backwards even for a liberally inclined intelligentsia that the (generally hysterically left-wing) BBC has reported on it numerous times, as shown in the link above.

Still, Germany does need doctors. The first step to solving the shortage of German doctors in Germany is to do away with the discrimination against native Germans and instead encourage them to enter medical schools. The head of Germany’s union of medical professionals has even suggested, as linked in the article above, slightly moderating the university admissions criteria so that more than the top 10% of German students might be able to get into medical school.

There is also Syria to consider. One report in the Lancet reveals that 50% of the country’s healthcare infrastructure has been damaged or reduced to naught but piles of rubble. The report more crucially covers the unsurprising fact that 70% of Syria’s healthcare professionals have left the country. Syrian doctors should be treating Syrians in Syria and to any non-liberal this is an astonishingly common-sense position. Even the wishy-washy United Nations is busy calling for funding to help Syrian refugees return to Syria.

Instead of the German taxpayer spending 26.6 billion euros ($29.09 billion) on refugees the country could send Syrians home and offer up half of that funding to rebuild Syria, including hospitals and GPs offices. The other half of the funding can be returned to the German taxpayers or used to promote German family formation, anything but continuing to fund the Great Replacement.

Germany needs German doctors and Syria needs Syrian doctors. Nationalism and its pragmatic policy-making could benefit both sides if only the inane liberals would get out of the way.

There are, as I say, many many reasons for Germany to reject foreign doctors from Syria and Saudi Arabia even if none of them became terrorists, but they often do: see When healers become killers: the doctor as terrorist, by Robert Sibley, Canadian Medical Association Journal, September 11, 2007.

In Scotland, a group of Islamic professionals including at least one doctor, attacked Glasgow Airport in 2007, and were only stopped because three local Glaswegians “set about” them.

Of course, many Syrian doctors wouldn’t dream of supporting such a thing, but it doesn’t matter if they’re pro-terrorist or anti-terrorist as long as they’re back home in Syria.

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