I’ll be in a German Consulate soon to submit the last paperwork for my immigration paperwork. Our family is taking 2x STEM Phds, and kids going into engineering, computer science, healthcare, and education with us. This is a generational loss, but I’m doing it to protect my children, as well as myself.
I’m performing a short fuse wedding next weekend for a prior student so they can seek asylum in Canada as a couple soon. The number of students/prior students who have been reaching out about how to emigrate to anywhere else is very high.
Wow that’s interesting. Why did you choose Germany? Was it difficult to find a position?
There’s plenty of story behind it. The key parts are that I’ve been visiting Germany off and on for 30 years now, ever since high school. I like the feel of the cities and the culture. Their engineering schools have room for people with my skills and interests (I’m more engineer than academic).
I didn’t limit myself to Germany. I’ve applied and interviewed across Europe, though it mostly centered around Germany. I had a good offer in Finland last year that I couldn’t get the ex wife to let me take the kids to.
Was it difficult? Plenty of work to keep applying, but there’s work to be had.
Germany may have real concerns about immigration, but the country needs skilled people, and just plain and hard workers, to fill roles. The alternative is to have major economic collapse, so the government is opening doors even if the populace isn’t always totally on board.
Good luck in Germany. There is a lot to dislike, but so much more to enjoy.
Wish you all the best! You can get citizenship very quickly and my advice to you would be to get that asap and then think about what you wanna do with your life. My friends in Germany all work on their exit plan. They’re all skilled immigrants but find the situation there very scary right now. The fascists are back.
If you want to do stem in another country there are only two choices that make sense: Britain and Germany. Everywhere else is either difficult to immigrate to in terms of culture, language, policy, or just doesn’t have a critical mass of scientists and engineers. Some of the other western European countries are pretty good too, but they aren’t as good as the two I mentioned.
I fear that Europe, as is tradition, will fail to capitalise on this moment due to internal division, with China reaping most of the benefits as a result.
I would love to be wrong. I hope I am. I feel like an EU at the centre of global trade and geopolitics is the least awful option at this point in history. Although with the continued rise of the far right in France and Germany that may not be the case for much longer.
For real. To me it seems everyone is sleeping on that, but some deep EU reform seems one of the most important things to me (maybe even the most important thing?). We will never be able to get stuff done if hungary can just block everything even remotely good
I feel like we have absolutely zero vision for the future. Like, there’s trade wars, actual wars going on. Russia and Israel are committing genocide and are ignoring the ICC. Most of the EU is cool with that, either because they support Israel or worse they support Israel & Russia both. So we basically abandoned international law and with that humanity itself, and for what? Short term political gains.
Instead of capitalizing on the influx of skilled & motivated people from all over the world we chose to give in to hate and violence a long time ago. With the help of frontex we let the most miserable drown in the Mediterranean Sea, die somewhere in the Sahara or get raped and enslaved somewhere in a Tunisian prison, an Italian farm, or the Belarus border just to mention a few examples. We abandoned humanity there as well and again for what?
On top of that, my country‘s infrastructure is falling apart, people can’t afford housing anymore, healthcare gets more expensive and worse at the same time, and we’re basically a tech colony with all the American and Chinese tech dominating our lives. These countries also don’t give a fuck about humanity, but they produce innovation. What kind of innovation are we producing? We have Spotify, great.
I see no vision either about what our values are (there are no credible ones), nor about what our business model during this new industrial revolution should be and how people should be able to make a living in the future. It’s so fucking frustrating to watch.
Having humanity and good living conditions could have been a vision in this cruel world, but we aren’t good enough to live it. We failed.
I fear that Europe, as is tradition, will fail to capitalise on this moment due to internal division, with China reaping most of the benefits as a result.
I doubt that people who dislike US authoritarianism are gonna move to China, a literal dictatorship straight out of 1984.
It’s also basically impossible to learn Mandarin for the average European or North American. Especially if they’re already in their 30s or 40s.
In this case the division means there are more then one ways to get to Europe. It also offers multiple different countries as options. The UK being Enlgish speaking and is culturally way closer to the US. Spain has the massive advantage of being Spanish speaking, which many Americans also speak at home. Many European countries like Germany and Italy offer citizenship by decent, which many Americans are eligable for. So in this case an advantage.
Also Europe is a much better place to live. A lot of people keep forgetting, but China is still a developing country. GDP per capita of China is about as high as that of Mexico. Another part less known is citizenship. The only way to get Chinese citizenship is by having Chinese family. Obviously that is not an option for most Americans.
China has a huge language barrier. Few Chinese know English well, and most non-Chinese don’t know Chinese well. It’s not going to be easy for China to capitalize on this opportunity, although it’s likely they will manage to get a piece of the cake.
European countries has less of this language barrier.
Ok but will they take useless dumbasses like me who hate trump?
That would require to create a lot of new jobs for scientists coming from there. Otherwise it would just increase competition for unattractive jobs and lead more people to quit science (which I did).
And speaking of MINT professionals, we have a lot of stupid processes and bad working conditions here. Yes, for example in German industrial engineering, a lot of experienced software developers are sought for - but honestly, most managers do not have an idea what a requirement specification or an API really is. If you don’t believe me, ask for the API docs of the thing you should work on in their interview.
A lot of these jobless scientists used to do work that benefited the rest of the world. Maybe we can give them a job continuing the work they did in the states.
It’s hard enough to get a permanent job in the states for some scientist, the anti-sciene and anti intellectualism is making things worse. Many phds believe a faculty is their only secure job, but it’s extremely competitive and pretty hard to get one, if at all. Tenures aren’t going to leave and unis take advantage of temporary instructors anyways
Is it ready for a ‘brain drain’?
My guess is: We are. Auto-translated:
Acting Education Minister Cem Özdemir has called for the admission of US academics to Germany and Europe. This would require a European concept
The acting Federal Minister of Education and Research, Cem Özdemir, wants to recruit scientists from the USA. ‘If researchers from the USA - but also from all over the world - are interested in working in Germany, we see this as an opportunity for our excellent centre of research and innovation, which we want to take advantage of,’ the Green politician told Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland (RND). The German university and science system offers numerous research programmes and scholarships.
Leading scientists in Germany had previously called for the targeted recruitment of researchers from the USA, where they are suffering under President Donald Trump’s government policy. The so-called Meitner-Einstein Programme is aimed at scientists whose work cannot be continued in the USA, or only to a limited extent.
European concept for the admission of researchers
Özdemir said that there is “a broad understanding that Germany and Europe need to be strengthened now”. This would require ‘a broad concept, preferably a European one’. He had already exchanged ideas with his French counterpart and signalled to the EU Commission ‘that the EU should use existing measures to support talented scientists from countries suffering from political and financial influence’. The future German government could follow on directly from this.
In the USA, hundreds of leading scientists from the fields of engineering and medicine recently accused the US government of a ‘major attack on American science’ in an open letter. This could set back research by decades and threaten the health and safety of Americans, it said.
