I am a British immigrant in Germany and I can vouch for how impossible it is to integrate into these northern European societies, if the rest are anything like Germany. I tick all the boxes of what German boomers would want in a "Good Immigrant" (white, educated, from western Europe, speaks German, good job), but it doesn't help.

I think overall Germans, deep down, don't really want us here. We are here to pay for the pension bill—that's literally it. But since we are here, they want us to completely assimilate and give up everything about yourself that came from our homelands. There is no respect nor appreciation for any external culture, so your "differences" have negative value, because you have to Be German.

I dated a third generation Turkish German for 2 years whilst I lived here and she faced fairly casual racism from white Germans with a regularity that would be unthinkable in the UK. She was often getting complimented on how good her German (it's her mother tongue) was or asked about what country she came from (she was born and raised in Germany). It's a racist country. Don't believe the PR about how liberal Germany is—it's liberal if you're white and German.

And I say all this as a white Western European. It's going to be so much harder for the average Syrian or Afghan.