Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

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• Hacker News
• I'm a Canadian/German dual; a praire, hockey-playing, hard-O Canadian at that.

  There is nothing German about me, apart from some family myths.

  Every 8 or 9 years my passport renewal at the German embassy plays out like that scene in Inglorious Basterds, where Brad Pitt's character Aldo Rain tries to pose as Italian stunt-man Enzo Gorlami.

  Long German pre-amble

  "Err-ahh... err - nine."

  Pause and stare

  "Ok een Eenglish 'zen."

  by goodroot
• Hihi people o/ my two cents here...

  So, I have lived in Frankfurt for a couple of years now, and after talking with so many other expats, I think I have come up with a solid reason why this happens and why I am also thinking about leaving Germany. My TLDR is that Germany makes it really hard to settle down. When you are a skilled worker and you decide to come to Germany, you feel that things in your home country are holding you back, so you move here to step up, to upgrade, to move forward. And that is not what you find here.

  - You drove in your previous country? Good luck getting your driver's license in Germany (I know people living in the Netherlands and Italy who have been driving since their first month there), and good luck paying so much for parking. And then, you might say: "but use public transportation". And I reply, good luck going for a dinner with your gf when it 0 degrees outside and raining to get the metro that has less availability (because it is evening already) or they are doing some maintenance in the line. In my experience here, public transportation is only good when is working hours. In Frankfurt, after working hours they reduce itinerary of a metro and during weekends - hahahaha - you would cry with me.

  - You want to buy a house? Good luck finding a bank that wants to finance you without a credit history in Germany (a friend already bought a house in the Netherlands, btw). Want to rent a place? Good luck finding someone to rent their house to someone who just arrived in Germany.

  - Do you have doubts or problems with bureaucracy? So cute... good luck with that too. Workers in public service do not speak English, and those who do don't want to speak English with you (and that is with me living in Frankfurt - one of the most international cities in Germany). Not even in the Ausländerbehörde do they speak English. (I am ok if the waitress in the cafeteria doesn't speak it, but not in the Ausländerbehörde).

  - Then you think: "ok, let's learn the language...". Germany is the most expensive country to learn its own language that I've ever seen. I studied in France and they were teaching French for free there. All the free/cheap German courses here are not for skilled workers, because with a skilled worker's wage, you are above the threshold for social benefits and all the cheap alternatives are out of the question. Then, you might say: "but you can learn online". Fair point, but how do you expect people to connect with your country by learning online? For me, it was way cheaper to pay a professional teacher in my home country online to have individual classes than to attend a German class here.

  - You have a problem in your house? Good luck waiting years for it to be "solved". I have full experience with this: we had an issue with the roof of the building and it literally took them more than 2 years to solve it. Because the roof belongs to the building and not the apartment, it is not the landlord's responsibility, and you need to find out who is responsible for it, etc.

  And, on top of all this, Germany is not a cheap country to live in, and the infrastructure is far from ideal: trains are always late and expensive, and you cannot rely on DB anymore. Internet is super expensive and slow (we have a bunch of data centers in Frankfurt, but you have no fiber connection in the houses here). Energy is stupidly expensive now (due to German politicians eating shit for breakfast).

  So... overall, I think skilled workers think about leaving after some years because small issues stack up, and in the end, you are not able to build a life here. And I don't even want to get into the topic of making friends here, maybe in another post.

  by zexias
• They got millennials from post-Communist countries after all transition periods for new EU members have passed sometime around 2011. Were already lucky because they didn't open the market straight away in 2004 like Ireland, UK, and Sweden. Germans were overconfident because their largest demographic boom was in their 40s back then.

  Treated that immigration wave like shit. They left.

  Germans worked really hard for every single nasty thing which is about to happen to them.

  by lifestyleguru
• My take: Nothing is funny in Germany? :)
  by sscaryterry
• I am the son of a (Cuban) immigrant and a German woman. Once, the police asked me if I spoke German, probably because my hair is dark and my eyes are brown. Germany has a bias against “southerners”—the darker your skin, the worse it is. If your skin is light and your eyes are light-colored, you won’t even be perceived as an immigrant as long as you keep your mouth shut. But if you look southern or Asian, you’ll always be a “Kanake” or “Fitschi,” even if in every other respect you’re more German than most Germans.

  Racism here isn’t so severe that it leaves you with bruises, but you notice it in the little things. For example, this year I was looking for a new apartment with my partner, and when I first made contact, I used her German last name instead of my foreign one—just to be on the safe side. Whenever I do have to deal with the police—for example, because of a traffic accident or something similar—it seems like who gets blamed depends on skin color. If some guy named Hans Müller cuts me off, the police are still on his side. If I cut off someone named Achmed, strangely enough, they’re on my side. The last startup I worked for as a developer really played up its left-liberal, progressive image. Even so, the bosses were blond and blue-eyed, and the janitors were Black Africans. I could fill an entire book with impressions like these.

  All the bureaucratic hurdles mentioned in the article are probably intentional. The aim is to make it difficult for foreigners to come here and stay, because these people are not wanted here. In recent years, even politicians deep within the left-liberal spectrum have touted the fact that the so-called migration problem has been brought under control. In other words, they have adopted the right-wing premise that migration itself is a problem, rather than the way migrants are treated and integrated.

  The tragedy is that we’re running out of people of working age. We’re having too few children and are turning into an aging society. Over the next twenty years, this will hit us like a bus driving toward a cliff, while none of the passengers see the impending disaster. Immigration could be our salvation, but we just don’t want brown people.

  At the same time, German society is tearing itself apart through policies that lack solidarity. Life is meant to be made as difficult and harsh as possible for people with average incomes. The last remnants of the welfare state are being gradually dismantled over successive legislative terms. Everything is being ruined by austerity measures. There is no longer any awareness that collective investments in education and public infrastructure are, in fact, investments that will yield a real return later on—for example, in the form of well-educated people, transportation networks that allow goods to be transported smoothly, or nationwide internet access when you need it. Instead, everything must be milked dry by the private sector, or it’s simply left to rot (or both).

  Another comment here mentions that sclerotic forces are at work in Germany. I think that’s an apt description. It frustrates me immensely that society can’t pull itself together to take bold steps toward shaping a positive future. Instead, we have to watch as the country slowly withers away, while one idiot after another takes the reins of government to orchestrate the next round of bloodletting.

  It's gotten to the point where I've now lost faith in democracy. Things aren't getting better—they're just getting worse and worse. And all I can do is try to position myself in my personal life in such a way that I can hopefully protect myself and a few people around me from the worst damage caused by this decline.

  by ahf8Aithaex7Nai
• > It's gotten to the point where I've now lost faith in democracy. Things aren't getting better...

  "it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" - unknown, often attributed to Churchill

  Rah-rah democracy advocates, and patriots of countries which imagine themselves democratic, often attribute all sort of mythical virtues to democracy.

  But the reality is no more than "statistically less bad than the alternatives".

  These days, the by-far worst problem for most supposed democracies is the excessive financialization of wealth. A century ago, the personal fortunes of most better-off people were tied to the overall fortunes of the country, the province, the city, and the neighborhood in which they lived - giving them huge incentives to care about those collective fortunes. Vs. now, the prevailing attitude seems far closer to "when this place goes to shit, I'll just pack up and leave".

  by bell-cot
• I couldn't help but notice that your post also contains bias against German people.
  by radiator
• You are (as am I) in the 30% of Germans (40% in major cities) with a Migrationshintergrund.

  At that point, it barely makes sense to call that a minority, it's just normalcy. If you find yourself in a pocket of unusual backwardness where it feels otherwise, you should probably leave.

  I pass as German based on looks, but my name is weird and my wife doesn't look or sound German at all. I don't think her or I have ever noticed any adverse consequences from that.

  If your German is good, you can just act and feel like you belong here and no one will challenge that.

  The people saying they're having trouble getting by with just English though are weird to me. What did they expect? Different countries are different, that's sort of the point.

  I do actually agree that Germany isn't the best country when you're looking for economic opportunity, but that isn't really what people are optimizing for here. You might disagree with this, but it's mostly not directed against immigrants.

  Regarding your political points: Ironically, they sound very German to me. Yours is a standard left of center critique in German politics. The countries that have a long history of being targets for immigration largely don't work that way, probably because extensive social safety nets are bad for the acceptance of recent immigrants by locals.

  by svara
• If German people move to African or Eastern countries, how long till they can get full citizenship rights? My understanding is never in most of these countries.
  by silexia
• I've been living in Berlin for about seventeen years. My German isn't great but usable in an emergency. I get by with it. Most work related stuff is English.

  Bureaucracy is an annoyance in this country. But the flip side is that if you persist, you'll manage. It's also not something that's necessarily a lot better in other big countries. But Germany could do a lot better by just moving a lot of the key processes online, cutting down on asking for the same information over and over again via paper forms, and speeding up decision processes. That's slowly happening.

  With AI translations, doing things in German (or any language) is a lot easier these days for foreigners. Also making sense of the complex processes with AI is helpful. Insistence that everybody should learn German is understandable from a nationalistic point of view. But you get quite far without that. Easier than ever now. Germany could be a bit more accommodating for this.

  And the reality in factories, on construction sites, etc. is that you hear a lot of other languages being spoken. Lots of eastern Europeans active in the construction industry, for example. And lots of nurses and doctors from abroad are active in their hospitals. Packages are being delivered by people from India and Pakistan. And of course German companies that sell to foreign companies have to deal with the notion that their customers mostly won't be speaking German. Germany is already a lot more international than it might like to admit.

  But it's undeniably true that you need to speak German in order to interact with especially older Germans and their companies. They simply don't speak anything else. Kind of weird because many of them are super dependent on import/export markets and yet they are mortally afraid of having to be in a meeting with non German speakers. I've experienced this several times. However, the baby boom generation is retiring and younger generations are already much more internationally focused. Most younger college educated people here speak English at this point. It's not that much of a problem as it used to be.

  And even talking to people is getting easier now that we have AI translations and transcriptions. I've worked my way through a few meetings in Denglish. Ugly, but it works and if you have a shared business goal, people get more flexible.

  Germany has been in and out of a recession for several years now and it's working population is on track to shrink and things like its pension and healthcare system are becoming a problem financially. It will need to work smarter to get out of that and that probably is going to require working with people that won't be speaking German from outside of Germany. Easy fix for that recession is just embracing the future. Many of Germany's problems are of its own making and very fixable.

  by jillesvangurp
• guys, join a Verein. some Verein. any Verein. that's where Germans make friends when we're new in town.
  by froh
• They joined verein but didn't notice it's two years contract with auto renewal, cancellation three months in advance by letter. Left the country after receiving Mahnbescheid. Have fun in this asshole-verein.
  by lifestyleguru
• This used to the case with the USA as well but it took them the last 40-50 years to reform. Maybe there's hope for Germany as well.
  by jdappletini
• Wow, what a take...that says a lot about you and nothing at all about the US. I would guess that you are actually your own worst enemy.
  by hunterpayne
• Germany is literally disappearing as a nation (too low a replacement rate and other problems). Pretty awful situation. Here's Peter Zeihan's assessment of Germany's future (or lack thereof):

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmEhTFjQB1g

  by giardini
• What are the numbers for context? How many people come? How many leave? In what jobs do they work? How does that compare to other countries?
  by thenoblesunfish
• Wow, lots of generalisations are being made in the comments. I'm German and have lived in the south-west for most of my life. I hope it goes without saying that Germany is a big country, both by space and population. We have some very dense urban areas (Frankfurt, Munich, and Berlin come to mind) but also very open "arsch der welt" hinterlands with villages of 100 people or fewer. This creates huge diversity in standard of living conditions as well as life experiences (and expectations). Some places are better than others, this isn't unusual. Thus, many experiences that people have written about can't be applied with any certainty to large swaths of the populace.

  Regarding the DW article, yes language is a constraint and does cause issues with finding/keeping a job and integrating into one's area. Believe it or not, this can also affect us locals too [1]. The bureaucracy is often _difficult_ and people behind the counter can be unhelpful.

  We definitely suffer from institutional inflexibility, leading to absurd situations, for example with our population of economically active refugees who will probably be forced to leave, which will lead to an even bigger job market deficit and possible economic decline [2], or how we blunder large scale projects like Stuttgart 21 (or 35 or 70?!?!)[3]. The German concept of identity and unity is also very complex [4,5], and sadly this reflects somewhat on our interaction with migrants. Couple this with complex domestic and international economic and political issues [6,7], and we now have a situation that is far from ideal for people coming here to work and build a life.

  All this can be difficult to deal with for you who are planning to come here or those who already live here, and I really wish that weren't the case. Please don't be discouraged, we want and need you, for more than just helping to prop up our economy and welfare state (by the way, thank you!). I believe that the diversity of experiences and ideas you bring is a boon to our future.

  [1]: https://archive.is/20240627085213/https://www.faz.net/aktuel... [2]: https://p.dw.com/p/539wt [3]: https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/stuttgart/s... [4]: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/auf-der-suche-nach-der-deutsc... [5]: https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article13813483/Nati... [6]: https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/deutschland-ist-lau... [7]: https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/research_institute/hri-...

  by hansvs
• My partner and I went to Germany and then left. We found that while they are desperate for skilled labor, they do essentially nothing to accommodate once people have come. Every step of the immigration process felt like another grift. Our Auslanderbörde appointment was borderline hostile, and our lawyer was a certified buffoon. Then daily life was beset with petty corruption. We couldn’t get an appointment at the burgeramt to register until we paid a fixer to go in on our behalf. Germany was full of petty annoyances and indignities that made it clear they want immigrants, but will not put in the effort to retain them. The U.S. is lately no friend to even skilled immigrants, but public government services are at least available in most major European and Asian languages. Go to the Netherlands instead. That’s what we would have done, if we had it to do over again.
  by prodmod
• you could try China? I hear they are famously enlightened when it comes to people immigrating, becoming citizens, etc.
  by romanhounds
• Somewhat off topic but since I see people discussing language proficiency using the CEFR system I'll ask.

  Which certification language test is most transferrable? I'm most interested in testing for Latam Spanish if possible. SIELE or DELE?

  by burner420042
• immigrating to cold countries who are not used to immigration is not for the faint of heart
  by anothereng
• Emigrating is hard. Expect language issue, culture issue, bureaucracy issues. Other countries are not your country but with a different language, living somewhere is not the same as visiting as a tourist.

  Emigrating is a generational project, you will forever be a foreigner, your children will be immanent children and only your grandchildren will be true locals.

  This is not a government issue, right wing issue, racism, or what not its just a fact of life. Be prepared for it when making the decision.

  by drdrek
• When people came to the country to work then retire somewhere else, isn’t it not a net benefit for Germany? Less burden on the social net, healthcare system etc.

  So what the Germans did is right, not wrong!

  by sinuhe69
• errr, no? when you work here for long enough you accrue pension benefits which are paid out wherever you live.

  if you retire abroad you spend the pension abroad. that's a net loss for the nation.

  by froh
• PR and citizenship are different things, one is just to reduce the paperwork and allow some bare minimum benefits and the other is citizenship

  The only reason to push language requirements for PR, is to make it harder to obtain it, its politically driven

  by hyfgfh
• This reminds me that I got fired from a German company (operating in DK) because I asked too many questions and would not stop complaining about the software architecture which was terrible.

  The company culture was clashing with the Danish culture that I was used to and also I didn't give a fuck.

  by wojciii
• Is Danish culture more flat in its organization?
  by mettamage
• This feels rather naive in taking all the complaints at face value. The truth will be much more nuanced, and ultimately countries should be more welcoming to the genuine whilst far more discerning with the deceitful
  by nmstoker
• >> About 60% of emigrants return to their home countries; 40% move on to destinations such as Spain, Switzerland, Italy and Croatia.

  So how many emigrants stay in Germany?

  by sinoue
• You might be thinking of immigrants.

  Emigrants are those that left the country... so by definition, no emigrants stay in Germany.

  by fallingbananna