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Comment by peer2pay | Hacker News Reader

It’s hard not to be pessimistic in Germany these days.

Population is aging and paying for the retirement money for all existing retirees is already taking up over 25% of government spending. There’s barely money for anything else so taxes and social security payments are poised to go up while already being close to ~50% for most earners.

There’s a strong and growing far-right movement full of populist and even neo-nazi ideologies.

Infrastructure is still top notch internationally but funding has been cut over the last decades and it’s starting to show.

I could go on but I think you get the picture. Many people in my social circle want to leave the country so I would really think twice about moving here.

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Well when a refugee with 2 kids gets 1890€ in cash, Kindergeld on top, free health insurance and free housing… I am also becoming very quickly populist and even neo-nazi follower. That’s income level of white collar worker after university studies and few years work experience. This nonsense with uncontrolled immigration must be over asap. Get the people some warm shelter and warm food, don’t throw money at them!

> I am also becoming very quickly populist and even neo-nazi follower

Yikes. Go read a history book before you end up like your predecessors from the 30s and 40s.

"Look, you're just FORCING me to become a 'neo-nazi follower' by helping these people too much!"

This is what happens when the established parties refuse to do anything about it and don't even address the issue seriously, instead immediately labeling people who see the problem as "Nazis." The obvious conclusion from this is that these people are inevitably supporting parties that see this is an issue.

It’s a very poor tasteful way of saying anti-immigrant sentiment doesn’t appear in a vacuum. That some auto label such people with this sentiment as neo Nazis is another issue.

A more apt description would be, taking money from Insrus pocket and giving it to someone else. Someone who deliberately broke the rules and exploited a system designed to help people in need.

I'd be pissed too if that were to happen to me.

While playing around with the N-word is certainly distasteful, the underlying question is pretty crucial.

Once upon a time, when Western economies were relatively stronger (compared to the rest of the world) and Western nations much younger, idealistic people constructed asylum systems that were rather generous to asylants and awarded them the same welfare payments as to the locals.

Year by year, the "global parameters" have shifted bit by bit, and these idealistic systems are now unsustainable. Germany cannot afford to be Sozialamt for millions of young men that manage to get there. It has too many unmet obligations towards its citizens, and most people tend to agree that citizens should come first.

Refusal to even look at this situation and reflexive blaming of all problems on "far right disinformation etc" will only make the necessary correction in the future much more painful and complicated.

Some countries, like Denmark, already understood the situation and adjusted their systems so that they don't attract people looking for better living standards under the guise of asylum.

Your numbers looks very wrong. Any source for your claim?

My numbers are very right. Straight from the table of the lady who processes this particular case in local Finanzamt.

So you don't have any source, just some anecdotal claim, which contradicts public data. And since when is the Finanzamt responsible for refugees? That's the job of the Sozialamt. Are you maybe talking about a guestworker, not a refugee? Because refugees are unable to receive Kindergeld, unlike workers of jobs with social insurance.

Please start reading about the benefits for Ukrainian refugees. Then comment. Thank you.

Ukrainians are a special case. They are not handled as refugees, but EU-citizen, meaning they enter the normal social system. And this is beneficial for Germany, as Ukrainians are also able to enter the job market because of this. But even then your claims are sketchy. Even with Bürgergeld 1 adult + 2 kids needs to be an extreme case for such an amount.

I don’t know about if this is beneficial. I was born in Soviet Union as most of the Ukrainians and I have rudimentary russian language skills. I just don’t hear from refugees about great joy being in Germany and working here. Rather about stupid Germans giving money for free. When I brought trailer full of kitchen parts and Kleinkram to the shelter the so called refugees were standing and looking while German female helpers were offloading the stuff. I was invited into bbq with friendly Ukrainians who work very hard on poverty limit and live in Germany since 2014 and they invited their extended family who were “refugees”. It was 3 hours full of complaints about Germany, bad hotel, not cool place (somewhere Bad Tölz where people pay sick money to make hiking vacation).

Elephant is in the room, Germany has uncontrolled immigration problem. There is no need to see me as a nazi reinstalling gas chambers. But these all people are refugees, let’s give them warm shelter, warm food and 10€ a day for personal expenses. Ok, maybe 15€ per day. But don’t treat them better than other people living and working in Germany for many years.

> And this is beneficial for Germany, as Ukrainians are also able to enter the job market because of this.

If this were beneficial for Germany and the EU, Ukrainians would have had the right to enter the EU and get a job before the war.

In reality, it’s just an attempt to mitigate another immigration disaster.

It will fail, because there is no immigration solution for plummeting birth rates. The people coming to the EU (not specifically Ukrainians, which are perhaps better than average) are already adults, often with incompatible or lacking education, often with a different, incompatible upbringing, consuming significant state resources without having contributed a cent. This can’t work in combination with a social state, it’s just maths.

What is ridiculous is that a "refugee" who burns his papers gets all that help. Then at the same time I had students who had to leave Germany because they did not find a job in time after their masters. These students have worked throughout their stay here and even payed into the system but were deemed either too foreign or too rich to get any financial assistance while searching for a job.

Germany is a weird place where if you play by the rules you get a very harsh treatment but if you cheat the rules you can get a lot of free shit.

> Many people in my social circle want to leave the country

And go where?

France? Belgium? US? UK? Ireland? Austria? Switzerland? Poland? Czechia? Luxembourg? Netherlands? Norway? Sweden? Denmark?

There's no perfect country, just one where you have the least amount of compromises. Or where your family unit is.

> Ireland

Good luck with finding housing here.

You can say the same thing about Berlin. Every livable tech hub is full.

I wouldn't suggest putting the UK in that list, absolutely crumbling and showing no signs of stopping.

If you work in tech you'll be fine there.

And you'd be fine in Germany.

HN paints an overly gloomy picture of Germany. All points mentioned contain a kernel of truth but also a pessimistic linear regression concerning the outlook of the future. We've got a very minor recession going on, that's all. The economy will turn around next year.

The energy crisis is of the higher price than usual variety (and is already way past its peak; look at the 5y chart: https://ycharts.com/indicators/germany_natural_gas_border_pr...). The greenefication of our electrical grid is ongoing and will cost us a ton of money over the next 5-10 years, but will pay off after that (yes, it would have been better to keep the atomic power plants running until then; that's one of the few irrational decision done by the previous conservative government and confirmed by the current government).

We had a large immigration spike in 2015 and another one in 2022 (Syria and Ukraine), overfilling the immigration centers.

Aging population is a thing, as in any other western country. Turns out that immigration is one of the things that counteracts it! And we're currently (and for the next decade) in serious need of unskilled labor, so even the 40% of syrian refugees that haven't gotten work yet (many of those because of the slow bureaucracy...) will be needed.

It's certainly not all sunshine and rainbows, but it's also certainly not a crumbling country without a future.

>Turns out that immigration is one of the things that counteracts it!

But where will they live? Germany has a housing shortage it refuses to fix, but is constantly importing more economic cannon fodder.

„Germany“ doesn‘t have a housing shortage. German cities do, and it‘s a huge problem. But on the other hand, Germany also has a huge infrastructure deficit in more rural areas - I live in Berlin and would happily vacate my flat to move to a 2nd or 3rd tier small town, but that means giving up on solid public transport, connectivity, supermarket next door, walkability and fast internet in many many places. Work wouldn’t be an issue, our company is remote anyways, but all of these things are a huge problem. Fixing those issues would mean less people want to move to the city, less pressure on the housing market etc.

>„Germany“ doesn‘t have a housing shortage. German cities do

Yes, and everyone coming to Germany will also want to live only in the big cities, not in some desolate village full of empty homes and super conservative boomers. How is this sustainable?

Yep, true. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Other states have plenty of beautiful, livable, attractive mid-size towns because they have in fact managed to avoid these issues. Have good internet, have solid connectivity to places people want to go.

The „village“ I grew up in has about 8000 inhabitants, it‘s 5 kilometers from a train station with trains every 15 minutes. About 70 000 people live in a circle of about 10-15 kilometers around that town. The next major town is about 20 kilometers away, or 15 minutes by train from that station. Yet, there‘s not a single bus to the train station. There’s no proper bike parking at that station. There‘s a bus every 30 minutes that takes an hour to reach the city center. Internet is capped at about 16MBit/sec. This is a densely populated area by most standards. Still, every bit of infrastructure sucks - except for cars. There‘s two different highways right around the village.

Germany will very likely never catch up technologically to the US. We aren't going to have the Germany equivalent of Open AI anytime soon, or the equivalent of Tesla or Space X. So if you care at all about being on the winning team, it's probably not going to be Germany or even anywhere in Europe. You'd have to choose between the US or China and South Korea.

"You'll be fine" is a very low bar for a country in 2023.

The software salaries in Germany are just low.

> Aging population is a thing, as in any other western country. Turns out that immigration is one of the things that counteracts it! And we're currently (and for the next decade) in serious need of unskilled labor, so even the 40% of syrian refugees that haven't gotten work yet (many of those because of the slow bureaucracy...) will be needed.

That calculation would work if Germany would be getting only kids and babies which would be adopted by local families.

It’s getting some of those kids, with a lot of parents, grandparents and teens in addition.

Many of those adults are economic migrants, without the education and the resources to succeed in any European country, never mind the highly demanding German labour market.

They will be stuck in dead-end jobs delivering packages at best. If Germany has a serious need of unskilled labour, why don’t those 40% have any job after so many years? I see three possibilities:

* living on state support is better than any of the jobs they could get

* they don’t want to work

* they can’t work

They will all nevertheless use all the benefits provided by the state, putting pressure on the housing market, state budgets, availability of medical treatment, etc.

Relying on immigration to fix plummeting birth rates is broken by design, with significant downsides. Nobody succeeded at doing this.

Or if you work for a car manufacturer around Stuttgart. They keep building pretty nice houses.

I do work in tech, doesn't mean the country isn't a failing mess that is becoming worse to live in by the year.

If you have a high demand job, that gives you leverage to move to a country that isn't shooting itself in the foot consistently and in a downward spiral toward authoritarianism.

I live in Switzerland since a few years back. I love Switzerland, it is the best country in the world I've ever been, by far. Unless you want to live in a mega city or on the coast. The only drawback is you must speak either French, Italian or learn Swiss-Deutch, a very difficult German dialect to learn.

I'd scratch France, Belgium, Sweden and the UK off that list. I've worked 6+ months in all those countries and well, they're not great. What's worse is they're going in the wrong direction.

I'm from Sweden and it is rapidly deteriorating. It saddens me greatly to say this, but I don't think my home country has a very bright future. When you hear the politicians talk it seems they finally realize that they have fucked up the country. But not to what extent, and their solutions are a joke. It will only get worse, and it will never be the same.

Before you consider Belgium, I suggest you spend some time in Brussels. You will know what I mean. Maybe Flanders... I really like Antwerp, actually it's one of my favorite cities. If you like beer, you will love Antwerp. I was working in Antwerp for a long time. But why bother with Belgium when Netherlands is right there?

The UK is dirty and the cities are full of homeless and it has a byzantine bureaucracy on top of everything. I'm currently working in Liverpool(not by choice, posted by my company) but I have been pretty much all over the U.K. Some places are better than others, the country side is all right, but still. Don't go there. The U.K. truly is a dying empire.

>I'm from Sweden and it is rapidly deteriorating. It saddens me greatly to say this, but I don't think my home country has a very bright future. When you hear the politicians talk it seems they finally realize that they have fucked up the country. But not to what extent, and their solutions are a joke. It will only get worse, and it will never be the same.

Context for others: Sweden has no language, income, employment, or skills requirement <https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/...> for obtaining citizenship.

In completely unrelated news, Arabic is now the second most spoken language in Sweden <https://digitaledition.chicagotribune.com/tribune/article_po...>.

I think that’s a fair question. The grass is always greener but most are thinking about Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands.

For me, climate change should also factor into this. While Germany will probably be fine temperature wise, I’m not sure if I’d considered moving to Southern Europe anymore.

Really? Having been in those places that's like going from bad to worse.

Where is it going from bad to worse?

One person I know went to the United States. Ten to Switzerland. Zero anywhere else on the planet. Not sure the US guy counts though, quite possible that it's only a temporary assignment from his home employer.

If you wonder what the Swiss do, when all those Germans take their jobs: my observation, utterly anecdotal of course, is that they commute to Liechtenstein.

Seeing that we are at the level of anecdotes, as a Swiss I went to Germany and don’t plan to ever go back. Other friends went to the UK, Japan, the US, Canada. So there is that. And not because foreigners take our jobs, that’s an utterly absurd concept, Switzerland wouldn’t be the country it is without cross border workers and people immigrating. Our dumb isolationist and social conservative politics are costing the country and community a lot.

I would say 'South America'. But I do not want more Germans (or other decadent Konsumvieh from industrialised nation states) here.

I strongly agree. Much of my social circle went to Amsterdam in hopes of better salaries and the tax benefit for the first few years.

The same is true everywhere else, and there a mix of unrest and despondency grows from it.

Society has failed this generation the world over.

The far-right movements are a completely predictable and preventable result of the immigration policy of the last 2 decades.

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