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Comment by VK538FY | Hacker News Reader

You say that it's a good thing but your examples suggest the contrary.

It's good because you can move to live and work anywhere in Europe.

It makes your serfdom in modern technofeudalism less geographically restricted. Makes you more free for some definitions of "free".

Very few people actually do that, and the downside of open borders is enormous.

There are other benefits like trade and cross-border business opportunities without unnecessary impediments.

You mustn’t have moved from an EU country to another. Being an EU citizen, I drank the cool-aid about the freedom of move and work in any EU country, but the reality being that there are so many cultural, linguistic, administrative, legislative (and other) differences between a country to another that the overall experience is painful and except for very high incentives (big salary increase) the experience is not great.

I struggled less to relocate from France to China than I did to relocate from France to Germany.

Like everything in Europe, on paper it’s good, in reality, it’s often mediocre. Sad thing.

It sounds like you've had some interesting experiences!

We might want to throw in cross border workers (frontaliers/Grenzgänger). That's a bit different. It can be very interesting financially even on the lower end of salary or qualifications. But that possibility existed before the EU and won't disappear after the EU.

As another anecdote, I found relocating to Germany rather straightforward. There definitely was paperwork to be done, but it was well defined and easy enough to file (even if it was old-fashioned as Germany tends to be with bureaucracy).

I've moved inside the EU twice and have no idea what you're talking about. I literally moved from one capital to another, rented a place, started looking for a job. Literally.

I'm relocating this year from Poland to Germany. I hope it'll be simple enough.

From what I heard, I need to rent apartment, do anmeldung, set up bank account, buy health insurance, pay monthly tv fee, register for taxes and file them every year. Then I hope to live without worries.

I'd say that contentious question of 'posted workers' is enough to make me ask myself if it's worth the sacrifice to have the possibility to live and work anywhere in Schengen/EEA/EU. But the other replies to your message include further valid points.

Remember that legal, economic immigration in Europe is possible without Schengen style free movement. It really wasn't that hard before.

I'm willing to study facts (numbers) that prove the benefit of free movement but they would have to show that legal, economic immigration without Schengen doesn't bring the same benefit. And legal, economic immigration without Schengen seems to have a lot less disadvantages.

Ah yes the classic overmodeled threat landscape

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