Shocking: Young people want to see what’s it like elsewhere.
That would be best for Germany as well, they’ll get to experience the world and hopefully come back with ideas for improvements. they’ll all be immigrants to where it is they move too, so they get that experience as well of being ostracized for being a human.
I’ve no interest in moving to Germany personally, from the outside it seems overly bureaucratic, more and more fascist leaning and super car centric and I get enough of all that shit where I am already.
While it is definitely car centric in some ways, it also has quite good public transport, and usually also has good bike/pedestrian paths, depending on the area. I’ve lived here for almost a decade now, and for 8+ years of that I didn’t have a car.
1 in 5 young Germans are pretty ignorant about how good they have it in Germany.
“hope to find” is not a great plan.
While Germany seems nice in comparison to poor countries, our neighboring countries do many things a lot better than we do. Denmark has a functioning social security system, Netherlands have actual liveable cities, Norway is rich and laid back, Sweden is great, Spain is currently the progressive inspiration for Europe, etc.
Germany is fucking boring, full of Nazis, falling apart due to neglected maintenance of Infrastructure over the course of the past 30-40 years, suffers from garbage conservative politics, is smothered by shit tons of bureaucracy, etc. I fully understand why young people want to leave. There’s nothing here for them.
I tend to agree with you, but, having lived many years in other countries, I can tell you, you have to leave to appreciate it. Traveling gives you perspective.
The article is very negative, so I assume the study results are too.
It would be nice if we could see it as the European idea of free movement and exchange between countries. With most Germans emigrating to Switzerland, Austria, and Spain - that is the European idea of a union, free movement, and free personal exploration. People leaving Germany is a national view. They are European citizens.
The article is very negative, so I assume the study results are too.
Which will always -and completely independent of the topic- be wrong.
Articles are negative because it gets more clicks and that’s all that matters. If the underlying topic fits or needs to be totally misrepresented is irrelevant.
Click-, engagement- and rage-bait > facts
And as adequate auto-translation is widely available: here is the neutral 3-page summary of the study in German.
They’re not going to find things to be any different anywhere else. They probably don’t realise how many young people want to imigrate to places like Germany; the country with the highest immigration figures of EU born people.
It should be no shock that times are the way they are now for young people. There’s been generational neglect for decades.
Emigrate to where exactly? These modern problems seem to be pretty universal so far….
As someone who was born outside of Germany but now lives here (with no immediate plans for going anywhere else) I regularly ask myself this question. Obviously many Germans seek economic opportunity in Switzerland, but the Swiss seem to really have about enough of all these immigrants. Then there might be other destinations that some people also bring up like Denmark, Sweden or Norway, but these fail to even break the top 20 destinations statistically.
In 2024 most emigrations seem to be in the context of people returning to their other European home countries. Out of the statistical top 20 only Spain/Italy (climate, retirement) Switzerland (economic opportunity) and the United States (again, economic opportunity, but recently with more people moving from the United States to Germany than the other way around) sound like plausible targets for German emigration at scale.
In all likelihood this could just be part of the general “mopiness” that seems to be prevalent in German culture.
Okay, hear me out. If a bunch of germans want to go to different countries and a bunch of people want to go to germany from different countries, you could just make immigration easier and allow a constant flow of people arround the eu. We already know international exchange programs are good for people, so im guessing moving to a new country also is. You get a new perspective, learn a new language, have to adjust to new conditions, etc, all really good things to learn in the long run.
The contention is that people want to leave in part because of high immigration. Germany is not like America. Everyone is entitled to generous social benefits. After many years of high rates of refugee admissions (especially following the Syrian Refugee Crisis), the national budget is becoming very difficult to balance. Taxes continue to rise for everyone, and services are harder to get. Even visiting the doctor can be very difficult now in many cities. Many GPs aren’t taking any new patients. Many young Germans argue that the social contract is broken. The state prioritises the welfare of new arrivals and the elderly, and ignores the needs of the young.
Of course there are also many other factors. Germany’s decision to prematurely shut down its nuclear reactors will go down in history as one of the worst political and strategic decisions in history. It caused electricity prices to skyrocket and has decimated Germany’s previously impressive manufacturing sectors. They also have cultural issues embracing technological efficiency improvements. Most government departments still run by fax machine (by law). Most paperwork must be handled physically. Most Germans still prefer cash. Etc.
Ultimately I agree with you directionally - provided Germany liberalises its immigration only for high earners. This has been the major contention. A very high number of immigrants are low or no skill, and cost the state an enormous amount. This is causing massive economic and social issues. If Germany halted all low/no skilled immigration, sentiment would improve for high skilled immigration. Young people might feel like the social contract were not being torn up.
Edit: the level of discussion here is worse than anything I have ever experienced on Reddit. All replies are some variation of “nuh uh.”
Immigration isn’t the problem. It never was. The Nazis just make you believe this. It’s not the morons believing these lies that want to leave though. It’s the progressive people who don’t want to live in a country that is dumb enough to go full Nazi for the second time. You are part of the reason why people want to leave.
The contention is that people want to leave in part because of high immigration.
No, they want to get out before lying right-wing morons, their rich media allies and all the propaganda victims (pick which group you belong to, though I have my suspicion…) demolish the country in preparation for getting fascists into power again. Because some of us were actually awake in school.
In 2024, most Germans, regardless of age, settled in Switzerland, which was home to around 324,000 German citizens.
That doesn’t seem like the most obvious place, as it’s one of the few places in Europe that isn’t in the EU and to which German citizens don’t have an automatic right to move to.
Borders are open. Switzerland did not join the EU (by a 0.1% vote margin in 1997 IIRC), but through three consecutive agreements is very closely aligned with and integrated to the EU, including free movement and work (IIRC).
It’s very wealthy and AFAIK has low taxes, though. But I’m not sure that Switzerland has a better housing situation.
But also, it’s not particularly surprising that Germans are settling in a German-speaking country (even if the local accent/dialect is quite different).
