Comment by tharkun__ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tharkun__ | Hacker News Reader

https://archive.vn/ucnQD

    The main problem: Many refugees are poorly suited for jobs in Germany’s highly skilled labor market and Germany hasn’t been very good at training them. To change that, Berlin is planning to introduce a points-based immigration system modeled on Australia’s or Canada’s next year.

German "Auslaenderfeindlichkeit" won't help either. I can tell you from experience witnessing it that it takes quite a while/a bit to convince a lot of Germans of someone and if they're unlucky, they will never get the chance to prove that they're qualified, because they get discriminated against simply because of their name or color of their skin is not the right one. German CVs basically require photos and other information that we don't even legally allow in the US/Canada (not that discrimination simply by name isn't happening there either). There are obviously exception where someone "made it". German "Stammtisch" culture will also pick up and amplify any criminal element within migrant or refugee populations and apply it in broad strokes to all of them instead of recognizing that there are obviously criminals among both German natives and migrant populations. That doesn't mean there aren't lots of law abiding ones.

On top of that Germany obviously has the same issues as other countries as well: employers just don't want to hire at the salary levels they'd need to hire at in order to fill certain positions.

    At the same time, job seekers face high hurdles in a rigid labor market that protects incumbents, requires lengthy traineeships and rarely recognizes foreign degrees, often forcing even specialists to retrain from scratch.

Which is not really much different in Canada either. Where else than Canada can you find the highest number of taxi/Uber drivers with a law/medical degree?

> German "Auslaenderfeindlichkeit" won't help either.

I think this is a unfair generalization. Positivity towards migrants in Germany is above EU average:

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/07/25/european...

So while there is for sure xenophobia in Germany, I would not say that it is particularly a German thing.

11% of the current Bundestag members have a migration background (names and looks as well), which is lower than the share in the population, but the number is growing with each election. It seems like social mobility for migrants exists in Germany.

> Where else than Canada can you find the highest number of taxi/Uber drivers with a law/medical degree?

Foreign law degrees would be pretty useless in Germany or Canada or most other countries, even if they were more accepted. A better example may be physicists driving taxi while there are not enough science teachers in schools.

Of course equivalent education should be more accepted where possible, but when it comes to medical staff or other safety-critical jobs, I expect people to be at least well-tested before they can start to work as a doctor in Germany. There are countries where degrees can be bought for money, while Germany indeed has pretty high (and famous) standards for safety. Many wealthy foreigners come to Germany for surgeries.

> So while there is for sure xenophobia in Germany, I would not say that it is particularly a German thing.

You're missing the point of the article, and I guess you're German because you feel accused of being racist, so you feel the need to defend yourself. The point is that Germany is having labour shortage while immigrants are out of the labour market, singling out an inefficient resource allocation.

>Of course equivalent education should be more accepted where possible, but when it comes to medical staff or other safety-critical jobs, I expect people to be at least well-tested before they can start to work as a doctor in Germany. There are countries where degrees can be bought for money, while Germany indeed has pretty high (and famous) standards for safety. Many wealthy foreigners come to Germany for surgeries.

Germany > the world, yes I've heard that theory. Until the world see it in practice with example like dieselgate, BER etc...

> You're missing the point of the article, and I guess you're German because you feel accused of being racist, so you feel the need to defend yourself.

Yes I am German and I feel the need to defend us a bit, because the term German "Ausländerfeindlichkeit" is an unfair generalization that paints a wrong picture of Germans and I don't think that xenophobia is a main reason for worker shortage, even if that gets repeated often.

> The point is that Germany is having labour shortage while immigrants are out of the labour market, singling out an inefficient resource allocation.

One of the main reasons besides lack of qualification why immigrants are out of the labour market is that German "Bürokratie" (now this is self-evident) makes it hard for anyone who is not very proficient in German "Bürokratie" or has the legal status to get a job. However, in IT I see many colleagues with foreign backgrounds. Probably because it is easier to adapt IT skills to another country than it would be with legal or medical.

> Germany > the world, yes I've heard that theory. Until the world see it in practice with example like dieselgate, BER etc...

Yes and digitalization in Germany is a huge joke, but treating rich foreigners in German hospitals is indeed a growing market and the reason is perception of high quality.

>Germany > the world, yes I've heard that theory. Until the world see it in practice with example like dieselgate, BER etc...

You really hate Germans, don't you. I think you have Germanphobia.

Asking for a basic equivalence of education is just fairness. Flooding the market with cheap, "educated" (but not really) labor is not a solution.

I do think Germany could do better in accepting foreign degrees, but so could the US and Canada. I have worked with plenty of outsourced IT where they did obviously buy their degree. They had no clue of the language they were supposedly expert in.

And, yes, you will find misconduct somewhere at German universities, but there are countries where you can't trust the accreditation process of universities in general and you have to run a background check on the specific university someone attended.

What we do need though is German companies to realize that they need to have internationally attractive salaries to attract international talent. And we should enable equivalence checking of foreign degrees so that international talent can work here. It just shouldn't be done blindly.

>Foreign law degrees would be pretty useless in Germany or Canada or most other countries, even if they were more accepted. A better example may be physicists driving taxi while there are not enough science teachers in schools.

Knowing science is a small part of teaching, especially when teaching kids where the material isn't super advanced. Other skills like communication are far more important.

I agree that the article did not talk about racism, or at least discrimination enough. I am a german citizen of Turkish descent and work in IT. I am a native German speaker as I was born and raised in Germany. However, I had to endure countless of sublimely racist comments in many job interviews, ranging from asking where my parents came from to openly asking if I was “like one of the a-social (read: thrashy/criminal) turks”.

Even though the demand for workers in IT is high, people like me still face discrimination. I wouldn’t want to know how it is for people who don’t speak German on a native level.

Whenever I mentioned this to Germans with a brighter hue than me, they all chalk it up to some bad apples being racist. That is not the reality a lot of middle-eastern/brown looking people deal with. It impacts our day-to-day.

Being white south american in europe is quite strange, people (usually old people) ask you were you are from assuming you are going to say germany/france/italy/spain and when you say a country in SA they first frown, then, in their heads, they try to reconcile their views of that country with their views on your skin color.

For example I got told several times I don't look Brazilian and one time I remember someone completely changing their attitude (for the worse) after mentioning I was brazilian

I have one last name or German origin and one of Portuguese origin, I started putting only the german one in CVs

I see!

Your story hits home for me. It's interesting to see how the social integration of migrants is judged in middle Europe. People with a Greek and Italian descent share cultural similarities with people of Turkish descent. However, they often have a brighter hue than middle-eastern people. It appears that this fact is critical in how they are treated/thought-of/questioned.

Just like the story you just told, looking “white/western” is more important than sharing the cultural values of the country you live in. I apologize for the stupid “white” and “western” terms everyone, I couldn't put better words to such a fickle concept. I also apologize for the overgeneralization, I love Germany and the wider German society.

In Germany and Europe there might be another reason why (especially older) people frown at a white German from South-America [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratlines_(World_War_II)

Funny how two people can have radically different experiences.

I have lived 10 years in northern Germany as an immigrant from a poor eastern European country, never experienced anything other than kindness and openness. And yes, many of my compatriots are renowned for crime in Western Europe, so my adoptive country would have had real reasons to be xenophobic towards me.

If anything, Germany is a bit too open, as 2015 and the ensuing problems proved.

> German CVs basically require photos and other information

I‘not sure where you got that from, but that’s just false. Most employers I know actively ask candidates to not submit irrelevant info like photos, gender, religion etc. in their applications as any info is a liability for an employer.

Look up AGG law and how all too easy it is to get a massive slap on the wrist for even the slightest hint of discrimination. Add PII issues on top.

Photos are still on > 50% of resumes I see at a medium-sized Berlin tech company. Age is also common. I can't imagine this is less common in the south and I know it's more common outside of tech. Both are still on most "how do I prepare a German resume?" guides for foreigners.

I think the photos are awful but they don't present any special PII issues. Resumes already contain names, addresses, and phone numbers and therefore need a ton of scrutiny anyway.

I don't know how common it is in Germany, but there is a "european format CV", official EU site where you can compose one:

https://europa.eu/europass/en

the form has top left a placeholder for a photo (though I believe it is not compulsory to add one).

I think many people will use that or some copy-paste format deriving from it.

> Which is not really much different in Canada either. Where else than Canada can you find the highest number of taxi/Uber drivers with a law/medical degree?

Cuba?

In all seriousness, it's by design. It's one of the side effects of using a point-based immigration system... that never checks for employability!

The Canadian system will just blindly grant points to someone if they possess a university degree, no matter how employable it makes them. Then it fills the yearly quota with the highest scorers. Contrast this to the United-States where an employer has to demonstrate it cannot find a qualified American worker at market rates AND that the immigrant it wished to sponsor is qualified to perform the job.

Let's be honest here for a minute and acknowledge not all foreign degrees are created equal. Academic dishonesty and corruption make certain countries and colleges known diploma mills. That's, sadly, not something Germany can fix.

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