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.
There's no perfect country, just one where you have the least amount of compromises. Or where your family unit is.
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.
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...>.
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.
But where will they live? Germany has a housing shortage it refuses to fix, but is constantly importing more economic cannon fodder.
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?
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.
The software salaries in Germany are just low.
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.
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.
Good luck with finding housing here.