Germany to admit 400k skilled immigrants annually
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
Now if you are car mechanic or some clerk salary goes towards €40k and one cannot afford living in Munich at all.
Other cities might be better and salary will increase in the next job, but in total it’s not nice country for immigration. As a skilled guy in Poland I would have very similar lifestyle without going anywhere.
It's the same for lawyers, doctors etc.
And of course Poland is a nice place to live as well, why do you make that sound like it’s a bad thing? It almost sounds as if you’re regretting some personal decisions, and are now blaming the country you moved to for not living up to unrealistic expectations.
Do you see any viable solution how to end yearly 5% rent increase in Munich? I don’t. There’s enough empty land around the city in all directions.
Don't live and work in Munich?
And of course there is a general trend of (younger) people moving to the cities (ofc less now because of covid).
So what? Poland isn't a third world country by any stretch of the imagination. There's no law of nature that living in Warsaw must be worse than living in Munich.
Is it zoning? Need for infra structure ?
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
In 2021 in Germany for an income of 60,000€ you need to pay 11,735€ income tax, roughly 19.5%. there is also no soli tax anymore unless you are earning a top-2% income.
Anybody who is usefully skillful and economically useful will be earning north of 57k. Anybody who is all that and earning less than the equivalent German is a means to keep salaries low. There is an oversupply of cheap labour fuelling the Niedriglohnsektor already.
That also means that high-performing individuals with an already appropriately high base income will be paying 42% on any € pay increase, which is not a good incentive to make people work more and/or more stressful and/or more highly skilled jobs /in Germany/. Why here, if you can be highly skilled and high earning in Switzerland and be able to achieve a multiple of net income and get a better pension system to boot?
That said, it's quite likely that Putin will have the last laugh.
Why would then work a lot of devs here? Cost of living is a fraction there.
But, surely there is a terrible infrastructure and the country is in the slow-baking civil war and permanently on the brink of foreign invasion...
No one would nearshore work If it's not cheaper then at home.
And no, these services are not 'cheaper' - people who want it cheaper, hire Indian companies.
As for local devs, then well, of course reason is the same as why dev companies exist at all: clients don't know how to manage the project or properly hire devs.
Zurich or SF are still on a different level of course.
Whatever salary you get here, you will get a much more secure life than the equivalent (inflated) salary in the U.S. gives you.
Advantage of old-school manufacturing IT/dev jobs in Germany: the ones paying less than about 90k EUR are covered by the IG-Metall union rules - 35/40 hour workweek (depending on your contract) that your employer is terrified of letting you exceed, plus 30 days vacation.
The amount of cheap land and beautiful spaces in those ex-communist eastern German towns (Sachsen Anhalt) in amazing . I did research around those towns years ago, and got to know a lot of empty beautiful places.
I'm pretty far from white haha. I'm a Mexican living in Mexico. I'm not dark brown, but deeefinitely look Latino. My wife is dark brown though.
We had an ok time while we lived in Germany. But we deffo got our share of racism . Nothing violent fortunately.
I'd exchange that with the sad/crazy violence state that my country is at though. Constant fear...
Also, that equation changes completely if you have a family and kids and don't need to shell out (or save for) annual 5-6 digit day care or private school / college funds.
I have a pretty comfortable life here compared with what I could ever achieve in Portugal, no need to dream with FAANG salaries.
Or is it that there are simply no companies/jobs/growth?
(also - doesnt the German weather get u down?)
If you happen to do consulting to the major groups (telecommunications, banking, insurances, international brands like OutSytems,...) your salary will top around 2000 netto, unless you move into management.
Those values are per month, and any fellow countryman/woman can gladly correct me for more up to date values.
And that is when one was lucky to take an university degree and land a job on the degree's area, the minimum wage should be around 400 euros nowadays.
Also you will also have the typical southern Europe culture that things get done when they are done, and in some sweatshops working conditions can be quite bad, and since not everyone can live on the main cities, sometimes that is the only software job in the area, so better not push it.
Yes the weather isn't the best, however in northern Portugal we do happen to have a similar weather, and without central heating (unless you happen to live in very recent buildings from the last 20 years), otherwise common heaters and fireplace.
Also the German region where I happen to live can have nice Summers as well.
People who emigrate purely for money tend to end up miserable from my experience. Since you mention Poland it gets into ridiculous territory - its a joke of democracy, extremely religious to the point when its not even fun to joke about. That part alone would make me leave for better places. And there are many more reasons to leave, mostly unfixable in one's lifetime.
A week doesn't go by when I don't read about some horror story from Poland about pregnant woman dying due to hospital refusing to remove surgically fetus which died in her due to archaic religious laws, ending up predictably with sepsis and complete failure of organs. Women doing illegal abortions in shady places which end up in their deaths. 3rd world country proper. Utterly corrupted, and properly fucked up country just like its neighbors (I know since I was born in one of them and went countless times to Poland).
The salary disparities in metropoles you mention are true mostly anywhere in developed world, and certainly true in eastern Europe at this point (Bratislava, Prague, Budapest etc.).
If you plan kids its a nobrainer - every parent wants best for their children, and raising them in such society gives them already such a bad start in life. Yeah, i would take Munich above any place in Poland or countries around anytime.
SF is MUCH worse. Healthcare there will kill you. It's easy to complain but things suck everywhere and the cost of living is rising all over. This is because of interest rates and commercialization of land ownership.
Anyone from an EU country has equal rights to a German citizen, any job that can't be adequately filled by an EU applicant can be given to someone from outside the EU.
And yes, as an EU citizen too, white ... if they notice you don't know the language or have an accent, it'll be coming.
I have many acquaintances that work e.g. in IT and while they don’t have problems finding a job, their spouses are facing serious difficulties leading to e.g. changing fields (with the associated loss of experience/earning potential), spending years getting another college diploma or settling for less. And I’m talking mainly about Europeans here, with already recognised diplomas and full rights on the labour market.
With that out of the way, I’m puzzled by the premise of the article. How do countries become unable to satisfy local demand through local supply? Something must be fundamentally wrong with the market. In medical care for example the conditions are bad and the salaries aren’t good.
And while in IT the average salary’s good compared to many other countries, it’s nowhere near what one can get in e.g. Zurich, London or the US. Software developer is just another middle class job. This lack of applicants seems to be at least partly driven by insufficient remuneration. Not surprising that the politicians and companies would rather import labour rather than developing the local market and motivating the locals.
Because these are globalized domains.
The expertise necessary to work in these areas is very much the same in Germany, Latin America or Asia. Therefore any immigrant can do them anywhere.
OTOH, the required knowledge to work in law, business and other related areas are dependent on the place it is applied.
The baby-boomer* generation is much bigger than other generation. Their retirement is not met with the same amount of young worker coming into the job market. Businesses need to produce just as much if not more as before. So basically we need to import the kids we did not have 20 to 30 years ago to maintain the same amount of workers. The same thing is happening in many developed countries.
* Germany's baby-boomers are younger than the one in the USA or Canada
At retirement age, no one is active in IT at that level.
For many decades, IT/engineering has been a bad career choice, and this perception has become part of the culture value system.
Demand and supply are measured in units of money, and when they don't match, transactions don't take place.
A quote like "...our nation has far too many people without jobs, far too many jobs without people to fill them..." is a statement about education, plain and simple.
I think you're missing an important part of the puzzle: there are no people for the jobs, skilled or not.
Look at the list with the most critical shortage: construction, transportation and hospitality. These are not areas where complex education is required.
Without immigration every developed economy in the world will find it very hard to sustain growth, like in Japan, Eastern Europe and South Korea.
We're entering a totally new age in human history: the age of population decline. But very few people have noticed this.
You're going to be a foreigner, when you're here, and that does mean that people will treat you badly. You will be expected to assimilate, and if you're black or brown, you can expect a lot of petty subtle/not-so-subtle racism from state employees.
I don't not recommend it (I'm an immigrant), but at the same time, you've got to be aware that some people are going to treat you as a second-class citizen as long as they are aware you're not german.
It's much more obvious when you go through the immigration process and have to learn about 'german' culture, and by that, they mean a certain type of white west christian german cultural traditions.
[0]: I don't know if it's still like that.
A Venezuelan-Canadian I met once in Europe made an interesting remark I never forgot. In the USA/Canada people care about what you do. In Europe, they care about who you are. What you do is much more in your control than who you are.
I'm seriously wondering if people are only pretending to be stupid when talking issues about issues akin to this one, where it's very easy to scream: "racism" instead of providing actual solutions, or even discussing the problem. Germany has a lot of problems, as do other countries that rely on the 'never-ending' supplying of foreign labor(which is unrealistic).When you cut the pipeline of cheap labor: see the 2014-2016 boom which ended with corona, people act surprised when local communities won't do the job because the pay is a joke for their needs.The solution is not regulation or creating volatile unions, after all the markets eventually truly balance out(assuming players play fair).The core issue to be tackled is the ease to which companies can strangle local economies because they rise the cost of living through the mentioned cycle.
Funnily enough, the article states that China will surpass US economically in the 30s, yet it maintains the rhetoric that immigration is the solution.It's not: If you're a fan and want to replicate the Chinese "success" at least acknowledge what they did: population boom(to such a high degree that now they have an aging problem), vastly increasing their middle class, etc.Some of the western corporatists applaud a nation that rose up in a fashion that has nothing to do with their own proposed solution: immigration in china is de facto null.('Maybe' it just has something to do with massive profits made there.)
Now i'm not saying let's replicate China, because nobody mentions their dead body in the closet, but let's also not propose a "solution" that has been tried so many times and besides being a brain drain, it's a constant push from companies showing their greed for 'cheap' profits.
So you're saying your entire rant is meaningless. There's a massive imbalance in power which means players don't "play fair"
To add to your point, the pipeline of cheap labor is also getting cut at the other end --- with quality of life increases, skill and education increase, manufacturing hubs like China are getting continuously more expensive to use vs already expensive local hands.
With this diminishing cost differential, the only way out is for the countries that were depending on that differential to increase their value-add to the global economy in order to eke out a new differential by being able to demand a premium on local products (knowledge products and physical products) because of tech/quality advantages.
Unfortunately, exactly in this regard Germany is also falling back in the world. After losing leading positions in consumer electronics (80s/90s), mobile communication technology (90s/00s) and so on, little is left except from big auto, and big auto is already generating most of their profits abroad rather than at home. Frankly, it's getting hard to see what the country is wanting to sell to the world. There might be some highly competitive businesses left (see BionTech by sheer luck, a so-called and often-praised hidden champion), but that's hardly entire sectors of the economy.
Again, I'm not able to discern what the selling point of Germany is supposed to be. And no politician has made any honest attempt to tell and plan instead of running on hope alone. At the moment, Germany's migration-fueled economy parts are growing based on the most primitive producitivity factor in existence --- head count. And head count is not going to be enough for the future. You need factor productivity, and that's not coming.
That number seems excessive.
> Each year, the U.S. issues a maximum of 140,000 green cards to immigrants sponsored by employers and approved for permanent residence — a number frozen since 1990. Another 226,000 “family preference” green cards are reserved for family members of U.S. citizens and permanent residents.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/80000-green-cards-ar...
It forces locals to also accept lower pay and also engage in unethical activities if they want to stay employed.
Also, the funding environment is a mess. The government only seems to fund useless projects which are doomed to fail.