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>> About 60% of emigrants return to their home countries; 40% move on to destinations such as Spain, Switzerland, Italy and Croatia. So how many emigrants stay in Germany?
Emigrants are those that left the country... so by definition, no emigrants stay in Germany.
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In practice, even the Trump administration is far less hostile to immigration than their rhetoric would betray.
ICE agents are arresting people when they show up for green card interviews.
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So your complaint is you wanted permanent residence in Germany but did not want to learn to speak German?
Most countries will grant PR without requiring a language proficiency. Assuming your immigration status is regular and you are a contributing member of society. Citizenship? Absolutely, you must speak the language. Residency? Not nearly as common.
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Footnotes:
[1]: As long as at least one parent is a permanent resident and has in Germany for at least 5 years (the same duration that's usually required to become a permanent resident anyway)
All this discussion makes me wonder - is there any country an immigrant can move to, and better their lives as well as the locals' life/economy? Assuming the immigrant makes every effort to integrate (learning the language, respecting local people/customs etc). It seems the world is turning hostile to immigration in general - or maybe it is just the impression I get from the media? I don't know for sure.
> is there any country an immigrant can move to, and better their lives as well as the locals' life/economy? The United States. > It seems the world is turning hostile to immigration in general - or maybe it is just the impression I get from the media? The world is turning hostile to immigration because the media (and social media sites) highlight and repeat the bad anecdotes, while barely mentioning the actual data…
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If German is an ethnicity, I don't see why the US, which is older than the German Confederation (let alone the subsequent countries that have existed since then on that same land) has a distinct culture and set of shared values, cannot be.
Native Americans would be a ethnicity but the US was taken over my European settlers. Europe the Germanic people have existed way before , a country is not tied to the ethnicity.
Here is my anecdote. I was in Germany recently and met with a South American woman. We briefly talked about our immigrant experiences. She is now a German citizen married to a German man. However, she said she can't identify as a German because nobody made her feel like one. By contrast, when I became an American citizen, my American friends (white and hispanic) insisted that they attend the naturalization ceremony.
>she can't identify as a German because nobody made her feel like one well, because she isn't one. had she moved to China, she wouldn't magically become Chinese.
I don't even have to go far back in the history of Germany and the defunct states that preceded it to find a patchwork of languages and cultures all of which would only be colloquially called "German" but many of which would be in fact mutually unintelligible from a linguistic POV and often quite apart culturally too.
I've also always found it more than a bit absurd that I as a second generation son of a German immigrant to Canada could -- because of blood descent -- claim a German passport and citizenship despite never having lived there.
Then again with the way North America is going, if I wasn't tied down here, I'd be tempted to do that and spend my retirement there, instead.
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There is yet another angle that people don't like to discuss because it is uncomfortable. Every European nation state is built around ethnicity as the bedrock of society. This makes it nigh on impossible to integrate fully in these countries. The way this manifests is different in each country, but the fundamental reason is the same. In the german case, take the words of Messut Ozil, the former footballer - when the…
> Every European nation state is built around ethnicity as the bedrock of society. What do you mean by it being the bedrock of society? I haven't found ethnicity to be an important part about being a citizen here at all.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state
The traditional view taught in history books is as follows:
> Before the french revolution, states extended as far as their kings' military power allowed them to, and the king derived his claim to power from god.
> After the french revolution, states formed around the concept of a common shared ethnicity, language, and culture (nation), with the claim to power deriving from the people.
> This shared national identity was instrumental to the unification of many separate kingdoms into the German confederation.
EDIT: That view is not necessarily correct (see the comments below), but it is what most people will have learnt in school
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So your complaint is you wanted permanent residence in Germany but did not want to learn to speak German?
Permanent residency is a business deal between two entities: an individual and a state. It has nothing to do with linguistics. There are many Germans permanently living in Vietnam, Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries, who never bothered to even learn how to say Hello, not to mention any certificate or exam...
That’s how deals work, both sides state their position and either they find a middle ground or they don’t.
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It is an interesting divide. "German" is both an ethnicity and a citizenship, and it's possible to become one but not the other. "American" on the other hand is purely a citizenship, and so it is possible to become an American after immigrating.
If German is an ethnicity, I don't see why the US, which is older than the German Confederation (let alone the subsequent countries that have existed since then on that same land) has a distinct culture and set of shared values, cannot be.
But even that is too broad. It might be more accurate to get even more granular. For example, you might identify someone like Tim Walz as belonging to a synthetic Scandinavian-Midwestern ethnicity: although he has no actual Scandinavian ancestry, he grew up in Minnesota in what’s a recognizably distinct ethnocultural subgroup.
A far more useful analogy might be that “American” is a college football team.
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> she said she can't identify as a German because nobody made her feel like one As a native German, I actually have difficulties with concepts like "identifying as [nationality]", "feeling like [nationality]" or "naturalization". I really would say these are concepts that US-Americans (or people who were "shaped" by US mentality) seem to deeply care about, but Germans very typically don't. So, my opinion/advice is: s…
would you say that a swiss german and someone from Hamburg have more in common than someone from Bavaria and someone from Helsinki?