BEELITZ, GERMANY - Instead of waiting for the next welfare check, Heino Wittstock is picking asparagus. The German construction worker has been unemployed for three years. But this spring, he joins some 280,000 Polish migrant farmhands, plucking the foot-high green and white sentinels from the rich Brandenburg loam. "I need to do something; Sitting at home on the couch is not an option," he says.
In an unusual effort to address its 11.9 percent unemployment rate, Berlin is also trying to answer a common refrain in many industrial nations: "Foreigners are taking jobs away from us."
| Just doing the jobs Germans won't do or at least do well, as we'll see. |
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