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| Europe |
| Germans Emigrate in Record Numbers, Fleeing Unemployment |
| 2006-08-30 |
| Thomas Koerber, an engineering technician from Viernheim, Germany, was looking for a new job. He found it -- 4,700 miles away, in Canada. ``I looked around, found a job I liked in Canada, and left Germany within two months,'' Koerber, 39, said in a telephone interview from Calgary. ``If I can get a better job abroad, and if I'm being treated better, I'm gone.'' Koerber is one of 145,000 Germans who fled the fatherland last year amid record postwar unemployment, pushing emigration to its highest level since 1954, Federal Statistics Office figures show. Last year was also the first since the late 1960s that emigrants outnumbered Germans returning home from living abroad, the statistics office said. Even more troubling to German officials and business leaders, many were skilled workers like Koerber. The loss of such people, they say, may threaten Germany's economic competitiveness in the future. Germany doesn't have much of a future, a 40 year-old German teacher who moved to France said Aug. 26 in a typical posting. The teacher, writing under the alias ``Kritischer Leser,'' meaning Critical Reader, said he's working fewer hours and making more money than his sister, a doctor in Germany. For Koerber, the decision to leave was largely one of taxes. In Germany, where the highest tax bracket starts at 52,152 euros ($66,600), he would have to pay 42 percent of every euro above that level. In addition, the German value-added tax -- a kind of national sales levy -- is 16 percent, which is scheduled to rise three percentage points next year. Other German expatriates cite what they say is the over- regimentation of the labor force. ``Life in Germany is totally over-regulated,'' said Christian Kaestner, 38, an attorney who moved from Munich to Cape Town, South Africa, in 1997. ``There are hardly any freedoms left, and you keep bumping into regulations and prohibitions.'' Government officials say the numbers aren't alarming, because many Germans move to other countries to work for a limited period of time, and return with additional qualifications. Today's emigrants are more likely to choose Canada, New Zealand and Australia, or, within Europe, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands. An estimated 2,300 German doctors are working in Switzerland, more than 8 percent of the Swiss total, said the Bern-based FMH Swiss Medical Association. Taking into account gross pay, taxes, insurance and the cost of living, doctors make more money in Switzerland, said Matthias Dettmer, 31, an assistant pathologist in Zurich from the southern German city of Tuebingen. He makes more than double his former colleagues in Germany, who earn what he calls a ``cleaner's pay.'' ``I don't know yet whether I'll ever go back,'' said Dettmer. ``Under the prevailing conditions, it would be a hard sell to convince me that it's better in Germany.'' Koerber, who's striving for permanent Canadian residency, said there's little point trying to persuade him to return home. ``I'll never come back,'' he said. ``Guaranteed.'' |
| Posted by:Nimble Spemble |
| #3 Can't blame them. If I could make a better life for my family and pay less taxes with less regulation of my life elsewhere, I would go too. Fortunately, the US provides most of what I need and want and therefore do not need to leave my beloved motherland. |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2006-08-30 12:32 |
| #2 Multi-culture is an attack on the existing culture. This means that the core of the nation has no ties to the country and thus no loyalty or reason to stay. Another "victory" for the left... |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2006-08-30 10:45 |
| #1 Well maybe that partially explains the falling French and German unemployment rates that Newsweek was so happy about not long ago. |
| Posted by: Swamp Blondie 2006-08-30 09:44 |