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Comment by rglullis | Hacker News Reader

That's a pithy description of it all. If I hadn't met my (Greek) wife in 2015, I've probably would have left long ago.

And to come of think of it, I think there is another aspect that influences this: Germans are not having as many kids as the immigrants, so the overwhelming majority of the kids in the kitas and schools are from immigrant families or immigrant/native mixed parents. This means that (at this stage in life) any new friends you get to make are likely through your kids, and even there the pool is selected against Germans.

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That's a very Berlin-centric observation. Berlin is special; it's hard to extrapolate to the rest of the country.

Maybe, but a quick AI-assisted research says that Bremen has an even higher rate of births from non-German mothers than Berlin, and the data does not make the distinction between citizenship and immigration status.

What do you mean with „Germans“? In my friends group, in my son‘s football club, in school, most kids have a so called migration background, but the parents are mostly second generation and mostly assimilated. So what?

If we split between second-generation (i.e, both parents born in Germany) as "native" and everyone else (i.e, anyone with at least one parent not born in Germany) as "immigrants", I'd guess that number would skew heavily towards "immigrants" in all major cities. I could be wrong, but I haven't found a way to reliably check the data.

Doubtful, honestly, though from what you described with Berlin, this feels like more of a problem of Berlin being a very transient city. A lot of people never fully settling there, especially so called expats, despite living there for decades. A lot of people being part of the cosmopolity, moving from one hype city, one startup, to the other. That’s okay, but it doesn’t work for everyone.

Your view of current immigrants is not that different from the Germans in the 70s who thought that the Turks and Vietnamese looking for jobs in Germany would go back to their homes after a while. Some of them did, but enough of them stayed to become a substantial part of the population.

Anyway, like I said there is a good chance I am wrong about it Germany in general. But I'd argue that in Berlin that is pretty much the case, regardless of how large the "transient" people are compared to "longer-term settlers". Once people start having kids they stop hopping around, so I'd guess that the amount of "non-native" children that dominate the schools have immigrant parents who are mostly settled.

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