An Afghan minister who became a bicycle courier in Germany

Simplest example: my first time in Munich I was struggling with the subway instructions, they were all in German and this was before Internet on smartphones and Google translate, so at the entrance of the station I asked several people in English if they speak English and can tell me what ticket to purchase (the different ticket by area concept was completely foreign to me). A couple said yes, I asked the question "what ticket I need from here to X station" and the 2 answers were in the tone of : - Read the instructions // - But they are in German // - Learn German.

If you go to Albania, where no foreigners speak the language, they will be happy to try to communicate in Italian (some people know it). Go in Romania, they will use whatever language they know (mostly English or German, but Italian, Spanish or French are not rare at all).

Everywhere in the Balkans people will try to communicate, same in Italy, France or Spain, not a problem at all in the Netherlands, Hungary, Czechia or Slovakia, no matter how bad they speak the language they will communicate with you. At the opposite side of the spectrum is Germany.

I travelled for work or vacations in all the countries in Europe except the Scandinavian Peninsula and Russia/Belarus/Ukraine, I never had a communication problem outside Germany. It almost makes me able to draw some conclusions from my personal experiences and the ones of many people that I know, including family and friends working in Germany for the past 30 years and for the 20 years of having work colleagues and one direct manager in Germany.

I am not saying Germans are bad, my best manager ever was a German moved to US, my current manager is a German in Frankfurt and he is a great guy, but the experience with the people on the street is that they don't want to speak English in many cases.

It's quite easy when you're an engineer with experience in a field in demand. Comparatively speaking. Leaving Russia was not so hard as long as you did the required amount of years and didn't work on anything sensitive, which if you wanted to leave you wouldn't go into anyways.

I have lived in Munich for about 15 years. It is has 28.5% foreigners, making it one of the most diverse cities there.

It‘s possible that you asked someone who chose to be a ****. But most people there are helpful.

Here is the communal election 2020: https://www.wahlen-muenchen.de/ergebnisse/20200315stadtratsw...

AFD got 3.4%. The conservative party got 25%. 28% combined and lumping them together is already too much.

> I travelled for work or vacations in all the countries in Europe […] I never had a communication problem outside Germany

Have you been in Spain outside of the touristic centers? How about France? Not everyone there speaks English and if I go there I try to adapt! I have struggled, I sometimes had to resort to another language, I sometimes couldn‘t communicate at all. But I make the effort because I‘m coming to their country whether on a vacation or for work. I don‘t go around complaining.

>>High schoolers who get rotated out every six month won't exactly be the best at negotiating or even think of unionization efforts.

Artificially raising pay above market rates leads to higher consumer prices, and massive deadweight loss from greater unrealized production/earnings.

Between 1870 and 1900, when there was no minimum wage, or labor regulations to empower unions, US wages doubled in inflation-adjusted terms, while US industry expanded and became financially healthier.

This was very much unlike the post-war period, where US industry was running on borrowed time, making increasingly burdensome concessions to unions that led to huge bankruptcies and retrenchment in the 1970s in many industries.

@AdrianB1 (a reference to the CEFR score?) said “and” not “therefore”, so you shouldn’t be presuming there is intended to be a causal connection between those two things.

My general assumption when I looked for places to move to in response to Brexit was that people in one country are much the same as people in any other; as almost every nation is “more xenophobic than they will ever admit”[1]. I happen go think that Germany is far less xenophobic than most countries[2], while still being more xenophobic than it wants to admit.

Assuming the same distribution of personalities is also one reason why I picked Berlin over any tiny village somewhere, as my experience in the UK says London is more welcoming of outsiders than are random quiet British villages, and I applied this pattern everywhere. Former coworker from Pakistan confirmed this hypothesis with stories from his experiences in other parts of Germany.

I’m looking forward to this pandemic being over so I can do meatspace language lessons instead of relying on apps and websites.

[1] for example, the UK has many loud people who refuse to accept they’re xenophobic while saying the country has too many Muslims (and then the Mosque they’re complaining about turns out to be a Catholic cathedral or a former Royal palace). Likewise apologists for the British empire. I even knew someone whose response to asylum seekers causing the Eurostar being delayed one time was to suggest the government would make the next train drive through anyone on the line, as if late trains were not a standard part of modern Britain (I no longer talk to this person).

I would be surprised if this was uniquely a British delusion, or if any other nation managed to avoid it, and the nature of the graffiti I saw outside the Bad Kissingen train station, and on political posters in Nürnberg (a city, but I’m not saying all racists live in the countryside), certainly indicate that it is similar.

[2] e.g. opinion polls showing high level of public support for more asylum seekers.