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Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

One thing that is specific to Berlin is that increasingly bars and cafes are staffed by foreigners. This is a quirk of the German employment system, a scarcity of staff, and the wide availability of expats in need of gigs. Instead of hiring permanent staff and paying them a salary, it's less risky to have temporary workers. However, you can't do that endlessly with the same people in the German system. You would have to employ them after a while. However, there's a never ending stream of students and other expats flowing through Berlin willing to do that kind of job. So, lots of bars and cafes employ those instead. Also, there are a fair amount of expats that stay in Berlin that open their own businesses.

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That is only correct for a very small number of hip cafes and restaurants in certain districts tbh.

You can employ germans indefinitely without "proper" contract as well through something called "Minijob" and the majority of cafes and restaurant skirt the law and let you work without paying taxes "illegally". Most of the ppl working there are students or in between careers. Only a fraction of the staff will be employed permanently with "real" contracts.

source: worked in the industry there for 6+ years

My wife tried to check into a fancy hotel (nothing hip) in Berlin and the receptionist only spoke English (and presumably some other language). It's not just hipster restaurants.

Even when the person does speak German, they're often not a native speaker and speak better English.

correct, hotels/accommodations are another sector that is run mostly through students and minijobbers.

When I moved to Berlin 15 years ago, this was not the case. Many bars and cafes were staffed by German-speaking people in their 30s - underpaid artistic or intellectual types or professional partiers making an extra buck. This had a particular charm - they were often cranky and unconcerned, but they kept the same job for a long time and you could get to know them and feel like a "regular." This kept me returning to the same places time and again.

These days, and especially post-covid, the faces are shockingly young, obviously inexperienced with the skilled or social sides of their job, and seem to never last more than a month or two. The charm is completely gone.

I don't think it's much different anywhere else; certainly not in the UK or Ireland at least. My father works in the pub trade. Hospitality work used to just about be well paid enough that one could make good money out of it in while also having the flexibility to pursue other careers - hence why it attracted so many struggling musicians/actors/artist types. In the last decade, because the wages have dropped so low compared to living expenses, we've moved to a model where hospitality work is often done by people in their late teens to mid-twenties, who are living with their parents or in university digs so don't "need" the money to the same degree, just the flexibility. They're doing it for pocket money.

People later on on life with kids or other responsibilities simply can't make ends meet and independent cafe/bar/pub owners can't raise wages without going bust, as the running costs have sky-rocketed at a much higher rate than they can acceptably increases prices. People complain about the cost of a pint going up £1, but really the cost per keg is such that it should be £2 more; however, if they charged that price then customers go elsewhere to places they can afford. Wetherspoons or Greene King come to mind. These sort of commercial enterprises can afford to buy a pub outright - so no lease fees - and can reduce their bottom line through economies of scale to a point where independents can't compete. Of course, these corporations don't increase wages because God forbid their billionaire owners and shareholders don't get their cut of the pie.

I've been in Berlin for 17 years, and in my early days in Berlin, a room in a shared apartment could be found for as little as €75/month (e.g. 6 bedroom apartment), and studio apartments could be found for €250/month. Hell, I paid €450/month for my 2 bedroom (3. Zimmer in German parlance) in Alt-Treptow (800 meters from Schlesicher Str., where I worked).

That opened up a lot of quirky social possibilities because the floor for survival was so low in Berlin. If an artist could throw together €400/month, they could survive on that. Now that's what a room in a shared apartment costs.

Even when I started a tech company, I got my cost of living down to €800/month, in the above apartment, which I shared with my co-founder.

> That opened up a lot of quirky social possibilities because the floor for survival was so low in Berlin.

All those quirky possibilities are a tragically underappreciated consequence of having a low cost of living in a place where you'd actually want to live.

I'm agnostic as to whether we try to achieve that through some sort of basic income or by other means - I just really hope that we try, both to alleviate poverty and to see the explosion of cultural and technological innovation that will surely follow.

My theory is that this is completely due to the raising cost of housing - it's no longer easy (possible?) do make due in Berlin on that kind of job long-term.

*to make *do.

Yes, I was shocked the first time in Oslo when I went to a cafe and understood that the staff didn't understand a word of Norwegian. This is probably a capital thing. There's an expat-run café near where I live (not in Oslo) that employs a lot of US and Australian young people for shorter periods, and if they don't understand Norwegian, they surely do a lot better job of hiding it and guessing what you're asking for.

As a social experiment, tell them you don't speak English. Only Norwegian. See if they manage a few words from their language course. They might actually appreciate being forced to take the leap.

If you stay and open a restaurant in Berlin, presumably for the long term, wouldn't that make you an immigrant? There is a Syrian bakery in my street and people don't call him an expat.

Its both:

Leave Country A for Country B = expat

Move to Country B from Country A = immigrant

The words mean exactly the same. It's just which perspective you want to highlight. Whether you left a place or moved to a place.

I might have been traumatized by US visa process, but in my mind "immigrant" has a very specific meaning: moving to a country with the intent of settling there permanently. And the US is very strict on that meaning: when I went to the US my work visa was explicitly non-immigrant, and calling myself an immigrant at the US embassy when applying for the visa, or while crossing the US border would have resulted in the denial of my visa, or the denial of my entry in the US. At least that's what the attorney drilled into my head...

Expat literally means "living outside of your homeland". So by definition an immigrant is an expat, but an expat is not necessarily an immigrant. Sometimes expat is used in a stricter sense (also called "true expat") to refer to people sent abroad by their employer on usually very very favorable packages (the "expat packages"): everything paid (rent in prime neighborhoods, private schools for kids, plane tickets to visit home, etc.), on top of an indemnity for living abroad, on top of the regular salary paid home.

In my case I was an expat in the United States (only went there to work, no intention to stay), but then I immigrated to Japan (now a permanent resident, no intention to leave). It would have been wrong to call me an immigrant in the US, but I am both an expat and an immigrant in Japan.

> Expat literally means "living outside of your homeland". So by definition an immigrant is an expat, but an expat is not necessarily an immigrant.

In practice, though, "expat" is used by people who want to define themselves in terms of where they're from, and not admit (to themselves any more than to anyone else) that they are where they are and are probably going to stay there for the foreseeable future: "I don't belong to the riffraff here in the country where I live, I'm an expat, which is something far fancier."

And possibly by a few naïve fuckers who don't actually mean it that way, and don't realise that that's how they're coming off because of all the stuck-up arseholes who do.

HTH!

> when I went to the US my work visa was explicitly non-immigrant, and calling myself an immigrant at the US embassy when applying for the visa, or while crossing the US border would have resulted in the denial of my visa, or the denial of my entry in the US. At least that's what the attorney drilled into my head...

H1B is dual-intent. You are allowed to have an immigrant intent when applying for H1B, so no, nobody would refuse it on that ground.

It was an E-2 visa (as "essential manager", not investor...), so not H1B. But again, that's what the attorney told me, maybe he just wanted to be super extra careful. But notice the nonimmigrant wording on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website [1]: "The E-2 nonimmigrant classification allows a national of a treaty country...". My employer did propose to sponsor a green card application, so I had a path to permanent residency. I wasn't interested: I had the firm intention of going back to Japan.

Anyway: my point is that "immigrant" and "expat" are not synonyms: "immigrant" has a much narrower meaning, which has absolutely nothing to do with coming from a poor country or a rich country.

[1] https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...

They never specified H1B.

They were probably on a treaty visa, Like E2 (which i have, it's not just for business owners/investors, employees can get this too) or T2 (The NAFTA equivalent). These visas allow you to live and work in the US for a very long time (extendable indefinitely for 2 years a pop in my case), but they have no dual-intent attached to them. They are a dead-end and if you want to stay in the US you need to start from square one with an H1B/Marriage or convince your employer to start a standalone green card sponsorship, which costs like $50k and 2+ years of processing, where the only benefit to the employer is that you can now get a different job.

It's actually kind of a problem, there's a lot of people on these visas who've lived and worked here for 20+ years with no viable route to permanent residency.

H1B is as much of a dead-end as E2/T2 is. There is no way to convert them to a green card. You can do an AOS from any visa.

This is the reason why I would not even consider moving to the US on a non-immigrant visa. It's either green card or I'm happy in the EU.

> It's actually kind of a problem, there's a lot of people on these visas who've lived and worked here for 20+ years with no viable route to permanent residency.

That's because the INA was written in the 50s and has barely changed since, and is unlikely to change because that would require bipartisanship.

IDK, I would use "immigrant" when someone moves to another country with the intent to stay there, and "expat" when someone moves to another country for work or study (so, longer than just tourism) but while they might choose to stay/immigrate, for now that's just temporary, say, for a year or two.

If you have brown skin, you're an economic migrant.

If you have pink skin, you're an ex-pat.

I have a parent from each of those categories and can confirm from this natural A/B test that that’s how they are treated.

My wife and I were ex-pats when we lived and worked in Belgium for almost eight years. Her employer was originally a subsidiary of JP Morgan, and she was paid as an American living in Brussels. I was brought along as her spouse (although we were actually only engaged at that point), and I was able to find work locally (at Belgacom Skynet, the ISP arm of the former PTT for the country). My wife got a very rare "unlimited stay" work permit.

Come almost eight years later and we were eligible to apply for Belgian citizenship. Her employer had been spun off into a Belgian company, and they were not willing to continue to pay her as an ex-pat. So, it didn't make financial sense for us to remain in the country. So, we moved back to the US.

We never had any plans to permanently move to Belgium, so we weren't immigrants.

But it was fun being ex-pats for a while.

Expats are rich, immigrants are poor.

To me it's more or less: if you move countries with an intent to stay, then you're an immigrant. Otherwise, you're an expat. Of course an expat my become an immigrant if they decide to take roots in a place.

I’ve seen retired Brits live in southern Spain and Portugal for 20+ years calling themselves expats and not making any effort to integrate, even though they have all the intent of staying there and not returning to England.

So expat/immigrant seems like a very social/economic background distinction.

It probably depends on the specifics. In Asia, I've known a fair number of Europeans who have lived there for a significant period of time and I would still think of them as expats.

I thought the "joke" was that expats are white, immigrants are not?

Definitely true on the whole, but perhaps identity is not the most productive lens to look through.

As a white expat/immigrant to the UK, I think it's more about whether you've committed to never returning. It's a very different mindset I find, between those who've moved and are staying put, vs those with the idea of leaving in the back of their minds. The privilege of the expat is being able to hedge for a very long time.

Still "immigrants" get accused of hedging their bets while still not afforded the "expat" moniker.

"Immigrants won't commit to their new country"

"They move their wealth abroad" etc.

I think that's fair. With respect to Westerners living in Asia there is also definitely a language/culture thing with stereotypical expats mostly hanging out with other expats and going to expat bars, restaurants, etc.

I make a distinction between a highly educated Japanese person working at a university and a boat refugee from Sudan.

Got nothing to do with race. We are a civilised people we judge on economics.

And you never let race be a shorthand for economics either.

Naah, they use method of conveyance for that.

Expats are yacht refugees, not boat.

In any case, if you're a EUian, you can live and work in Germany (or any other EU country) just like a native of the country (some restrictions may apply/may have applied, e.g. with the UK (when it was part of the EU) restricting the number of Romanians and other "freshly joined the EU" citizens who could live there). There's even no need to have a high-paying contract like software dev or brain surgeon, you can be a dishwasher.

Maybe it's not just EU, but EFTA as well, I was in Iceland and there were a lot of Eastern Europeans working in the retail stores.

There are a number of overlapping things.

Within the EU, the "four freedoms" apply, of which on "freedom of movement" is the thing mainly at play.

The EFTA states have a similar distinct thing between them.

How all EFTA states (bar Switzerland - i.e. Iceland, Norway, Lichtenstein) are also in the EEA Agreement, and the EU "four freedoms" also apply there.

Switzerland has a raft of linked treaties with the EU, which sort of replicate the EEA agreement, and includes the "four freedoms".

Same for Amsterdam and other expat-heavy places.

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