Advice for emigrating to Germany

Due to recent events, I'd like to write some basic advice for any of my American readers who might be considering moving to Germany. After all, the USA took in a lot of Germans when Germany went through dark and troubled times, so it's only fair if Germany returns the favor.

Here are the major options I am aware of.

Via citizenship in an EU country

If you have citizenship in an EU member nation - or Norway, Iceland, or Liechtenstein - you are in luck. You can visit Germany whenever you want for up to three months and then can stay if you have found a job or some means of supporting yourself - and being within Germany makes finding a job a lot easier.

Note that the UK still counts as an "EU member nation" for this purpose - Article 50, which is a prerequisite for the Brexit, has not been triggered yet, and even afterwards there will be a two year transition period where the UK will still be a member. What happens afterwards is less clear, but if you have established yourself in Germany until then there will likely be options for staying.

You might have heard that there are possibilities of gaining German citizenship if you have German ancestors. This option exists, but only in a very few specific cases - one of your ancestors must have been deprived of German citizenship during the Third Reich for "Political, Racial, or Religious reasons". If your ancestors emigrated before the 30th of January 1933 and the 9th of May 1945, you are out of luck.

As a student

This is one of the easier ways of getting in, and actually a great opportunity. For starters, no public German university currently charges any tuition fees - even to foreigners. Furthermore, many German universities actually offer English-language degrees and courses these days, so you don't even need to speak the language upon arrival - although I still strongly recommend learning it as quickly as possible once you get here, since it will make your life a lot easier.

As you are presumably not an EU citizen (otherwise you would have chosen the option above), you do need to demonstrate that you have adequate funds for your first year of studies on a locked bank account - currently, that amount is 8,640 Euros. You don't actually have to spend it all (though living expenses, especially rent, should not be underestimated), but you do need to demonstrate that you have it. Furthermore, as a non-EU student you are somewhat limited in your ability to work on the side - there is a maximum of "120 full or 240 half days per year" that you are allowed to work. Exceptions exists for student assistants working at universities, and if you have skills that are in particular demand you might also get an exception for other types of work, but you shouldn't count on it.

Your first stop for information relating to studying in Germany is the website of the DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Service. Particular requirements applying to American students can be found here.

By finding a job in Germany

This is more tricky. While you can stay in Germany for up to three months on a tourist visa and look for a job, you need to leave after that and then apply for a job visa while back in the United States. Which requires that you have a job offer from an employer in Germany and that employer must vouch that they couldn't find an EU citizen who is as well qualified for the job as you are. This is a mere formality in some fields, but a lot trickier in others. As a general rule, people with skills that are highly sought after in the USA that are applicable elsewhere will have a much easier time. If you are a good software developer or a first-grade engineer there might be opportunities for you, but if you are an expert in American case law you are going to have problems. Look around on job boards like Monster or Stepstone for jobs with English-language job titles and do take note of the language proficiency requirements.

Universities and other research institutes might be some of the best opportunities, since they are used to having international employees and how to deal with their needs. And departments always need new PhD students - these are paid poorly, but at least in the STEM fields it's usually enough for one person to live on (as I know from personal experience). Just make sure that you get out of the universities in time, as long-term career perspectives there are dismal and staying there too long will make it more difficult to get an industry job (as I also know from personal experience).

Beyond that, if you are already working for a multinational corporation you might be able to get a transferral to Germany - it will certainly be easier than applying with a German company that doesn't know you.

By applying for asylum

Sorry, but no. Things would have to deteriorate a lot in the USA for any German authority to even consider granting an American citizen asylum, and this would also require German-American political relations to sour so badly that German authorities no longer care about the political fallout from such a decision. Put this option out of your mind and concentrate on one of the more realistic options outlined above.

Useful Links

• Toytown Germany: An English-language site for expatriates in Germany, with fairly large and active forums.
• Expatica: Another website for expatriate with its own Germany section.
• Expats in Germany Blog Directory: Read how other expatriates deal with life in Germany so that you know what you are getting into. Heck, even read these blogs even if you aren't considering moving to Germany - they are frequently enormously entertaining in their own right.

Any Questions or Comments?

Obviously, moving to another country is a huge topic, and this post is intended to give only the barest outline and a starting point for further discussions. Have any additional questions? Ask them in the comments, and I will try to answer them in future posts. Do you have your own experience with being an expatriate and/or living in Germany? Share your insights here as well.

What North Korea gets out of the Sony Hack

The Hack of Sony has been getting a lot of airtime as of late, and rightfully so. I will leave it to others to fully explain the sheer amount of damage it did to the company. However, a primary suspect for the hack that has emerged is North Korea, and that warrants some further attention.

Many reacted in disbelief over this accusation - after all, why go that far over a mere movie even if that plot was likely to upset the North Korean leadership (considering that involved an assassination plot against the Supreme Reader)? But what those people are missing is that stopping was not the point of the whole exercise (assuming for the moment that North Korea really was behind it) - it was just an excuse.

Keep in mind that North Korea has very few sources of revenue - and it is, in fact, dependent on humanitarian aid to prevent wide-spread starvation. If the nation opened up more, it might get more aid - but it will also weaken the regime, possibly causing it to collapse.

And they can't have that. Instead, North Korea has always used a different approach - acting as if they are a crazy loon who must be appeased before they hurt anyone. All those military threats, all those artillery pieces aimed at Seoul, even the nuclear weapons tests... all those are North Korea saying: "Negotiate with us and make us concessions, before something happens you will regret!"

So far, it has worked for them. But, well, sooner or later such threats get stale. If you haven't shelled Seoul for a few decades, then nobody is going to believe you are planning to do it soon. And the nuclear weapons held the attention of the world for a while, but now they too no longer move many headlines. And the thing about military attacks is that they would represent regime suicide if they are actually used - sure, you can hurt (some) enemy nations, but after that they will flatten you. Which is why the North Korean regime - which is very interested in its own survival - won't use them.

But this hack? It works out brilliantly for North Korea. It was no military attack, which means that it will be hard to justify military strikes in return. But they hurt one of the biggest companies in the world very, very badly - and considering the attack was against a media company, and involved a potential blockbuster, the attack and its consequences are now very public. Suddenly, North Korea is discussed by everyone again, and everyone fears them again. How many other companies are vulnerable to attacks like these? Far too many - and as a result, many others will tell their respective governments to tread more softly with North Korea and perhaps give them more concessions - just so that they won't strike again.


Mission accomplished.

My thoughts about Ferguson

The aftermath of the Ferguson shooting as well as the recent Grand Jury verdict on the case have made it as far as the German news media, and this compelled me to write down my own thoughts on this issue.

A Nation in Fear

The United States, a very high percentage of armed people. Anyone around you might be armed, and thus anyone around you might be a threat to your life.

And "I was afraid for my own life" is a legitimate reason for lethal self-defence. And since, in the United States, there is almost always a reason to feel threatened like that by a stranger, it becomes disturbingly easy to justify shooting shooting said stranger in a manner that will satisfy the average jury. This, of course, includes the police - who are far more likely to shoot for kill in the USA than elsewhere in the developed world. In all of 2013, German police officers shot 42 bullets at other people, killing eight. In the USA - a country with only four times the people of Germany - police officers killed 45 people in January 2013 alone.

So shooting others is easy to justify. And it becomes especially easy if said stranger is a member of an ethnic group which is portrayed as especially "violent" and "prone to crime" by the prevailing media narratives.

Echoes of Trayvon Martin

If the shooting of Martin Brown had been an isolated incident - if it had been a single aberration - there wouldn't have been so many protests. But there are ample precedents.

It may be instructive to go back to the shooting of Trayvon Martin. The "mistake" of Trayvon Martin was walking around a neighborhood where a local thought he didn't belong. That was enough to cause his death.

His second mistake may have been that he didn't carry a gun of his own. After all, he was provably stalked by an armed stranger - and that, according to the logic established above, would have been enough to make him fear for his life and establish a legitimate case for lethal self-defense. It wouldn't even matter if - as George Zimmerman claims - that Trayvon Martin threw the first punch during their altercation. As long as he had sufficient reason to be afraid of his life - and who wouldn't, if stalked by an armed stranger? - he would have been amply justified in using any force necessary to stop Zimmerman from posing a threat to him.

Though it remains an open question if the jury would have seen it the same way, or indeed the police wouldn't have simply shot him at the scene. But he didn't have a gun while Zimmerman did, so Zimmerman shot him, survived, and got free.

And immediately afterwards a campaign began to vilify Trayvon Martin - painting him as a "violent thug" instead of a normal teenager who had every reason to be afraid of his life - while Zimmerman was lauded as a "hero" by too many people - standing up for the right to shoot black teenagers who look "suspicious".

Young black people apparently can't win. As long as the narrative portraying them as "violent" and "dangerous" persists, they remain targets that can be shot nearly at will. If they try to look as unthreatening as possible - playing out "respectability politics" - they need to constantly watch their steps and live under constant fear about "stepping out of line", to a far greater degree than white people do. And the other alternative - arming themselves so that they can better defend themselves - looks rather dubious, since that would only play into the "blacks as violent thugs" narrative and is thus far more likely to get them killed. In fact, considering recent cases where carrying toy guns was enough for black men to be shot, carrying actual weapons looks like an invitation to suicide-by-cop.

Police - The Face of Oppression

Which brings us to the next point - law enforcement. I've seen people claim that if Michael Brown and other young black people in similar situations had acted just like the police wanted them to, nothing would have happened to them.

I find that dubious. Maybe they wouldn't have been killed, but it is still very possible that something bad could have happened to them with no fault on their part. It needs to be remembered that the police in Ferguson - and too many other places like it - does not act as the "friendly neighborhood cop", always willing to assist ordinary citizens. Instead, there is plenty of evidence that they were simply the biggest extortion racket around, preying upon the community's poorest members because those had the least access to legal counsel.

How long would you be willing to remain quiet in the face of oppression? Ask that yourself, before you condemn the protesters of Ferguson.

And while Ferguson might be an extreme case, it is hardly the only one. Systematic abuse of, for example, forfeiture laws is disturbingly common. Not all police departments in the United States are rotten, but in many the rot sits deeply. They are the oppressors in many cases, and it is the poorest who have noticed it first - and that includes much of black America.

And as long as it remains easy to justify shooting others, and as long as black people continue to be portrayed as a threat to others, the killings will continue.

What is to be done?

Frankly, I do not know if it is even possible to fix this. Guns are too prolific and too much a part of American life to eliminate the constant fear of violence, and harsher gun control laws probably wouldn't change anything - just like with Prohibition, it would only drive the guns underground instead of removing them.

And the narrative of black Americans as dangerous will continue as long as poverty affects black Americans disproportionally - after all, it is always useful for the upper classes when the middle classes have a lower class to look down to, and fear.

So this narrative will only end if there is a long-term, concentrated movement to lift black America out of poverty - but that will require fixing housing discrimination, unequal school funding, job discrimination and so many other forms of structural discrimination that even stricter gun control seems less of a long shot in comparison.

So no, I don't have any ideas for how to fix this, except to keep on talking about it. What are your thoughts?

My Problem with Libertarianism

Ever since I have heard of the political philosophy of Libertarianism I had my doubts on whether it could work in real life - same as with Communism, in fact. Sure, some aspects of it may sound appealing (again, just like with Communism), but I just don't buy that it could function in a large-scale society (again like Communism, which so far has been shown that it can also only work in small communities).

Sure, it would be nice if transfers of money or other property involving your own could only happen with your consent - but the big problem is that "property" is largely a legal fiction created by the consent of society as a whole. There is no "natural", scientific definition of property, and property as a concept exists only because there are a sufficient number of people willing to enforce it (with force, if necessary). And like all legal fictions it runs into problems when you examine it closer and consider its implications.

For example, let's assume someone owns a small forest on the top of a hill. One day, the owner of this property decides that he wants to chop down all the trees and sell the lumber. It's his right - after all, the forest is his property.

Yet the forest also stored a lot of ground water between the roots of the trees - and a farm located downhill which was owned by someone else depended on that water. Now the ground will be far drier, the harvests smaller, and the farmland worth less. Thus, the owner of the forest - by doing what he wants with his own property - has directly harmed the property of the second. Does the farmer deserve compensation from the owner of the hilltop property, or not?

And the example can be extended to a far larger scale. Take the Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies irrigation water for most of the Great Plains region of the United States. Consumption of the aquifer water far out-paces its regeneration, and it is likely that it will run dry within the next few decades, effectively putting an end to irrigation in much of the area. Could you really get every farmer in this region to voluntarily limit their water consumption to a sustainable level? I think not - if this decision is left to freely-entered agreements between citizens, then the inevitable outcome will be that the aquifer will run dry, rendering vast stretches of farmland nearly worthless. If there is going to be any solution at all, it will have to involve a government which must be willing to enforce its decisions with force. Hopefully most farmers working these lands will support the government concept and have voted for it - but if a significant minority refuses to honor any agreement because they feel that they can do what they want with their land, then everyone will suffer.

And beyond natural resources there is infrastructure to consider. Almost everyone is dependent on the roads that lead from their homes to their places of work, places to shop, and anywhere else they want to go. If these roads are owned privately, and the owners of even part of the route decide to charge more for their use or even prevent others from using them entirely, then everyone who is dependent on these roads suffers and the properties these roads connect to will drastically drop in value - and their owners are harmed, simply because someone else is doing with their property what they want.

Of course, building an effective road and transportation system is likely to involve forcing others to relinquish their property, as there are constraints on the shape and paths of transportation networks. Without the power of eminent domain, your paths will be a lot more inefficient and circuitous, to the economic detriment of all who need to use them. This is especially important in densely-populated places like Europe where properties have been subdivided over many, many centuries. Other regions, like the Americas, may have more room for settlements to expand without government intervention - but that's only because the governments in question invoked eminent domain against all the prior inhabitants of the land.

Thus, some amount of coercion is necessary for any large-scale society to function at all - and the best one can hope for is a government that only uses this force as little as possible, and is responsive to the needs of its citizens.

Just to make it clear, though - I do not advocate for the government to take over all matters of commerce. Far from it! The markets have brought us vast wealth and standards of living our ancestors could only dream of. However, I do not believe that the free market is the answer to each and every problem we are facing - some problems are best solved by the markets, while others are best tackled by the government, while others still will fare better when both cooperate. As always, real life requires compromise - and compromise is something that doesn't seem to fare well in Libertarianism.

#Aufschrei

Aufschrei (noun):

1. A cry of pain.
2. A cry of rage or indignation.

 This double meaning fits the #aufschrei hashtag very well which has been trending in the German language parts of Twitter for the last few days as women recount their experiences with sexism. How did it come to this?

Obviously, the sexism has always been present and despite this allegedly more modern age it has not gone away or even been reduced as much as some might want to believe. But the ultimate trigger for the current discussion were several recent news stories:

• A Catholic hospital in Cologne refused an examination to a rape victim because they didn't want to be "in the position of having to advise on possible unwanted pregnancies resulting from [...] attacks".
• Rainer Brüderle, one of the great unreconstructed Old White Men of the German Liberal Democratic Party who has been scheming for years to return to the party leadership has been accused by a female journalist of making a sexist joke at her expense.
• Another female journalist has reported on her experiences with the rampant sexism within the fairly young Pirate Party.

However, the discussion has grown beyond these individual stories. The same people as usual are trying to downplay the problems - but for the time being at least the women's stories are heard. Time will tell if this changes anything in the long run, but if you can read German now would be a good time to pay attention to the stories.

On Privilege in Germany

Much has been written about Privilege in the sense of aspects like White Privilege, Male Privilege, or First World Privilege. In particular, I've participated in many discussions about Privilege in the United States. It is therefore only fair that I discuss how Privilege shapes German society. These are my own personal views only, and very likely incomplete or possibly even wrong in places - so if you have alternative views, please share them.

First, let us look at Privilege based on the social class of one's parents (disregarding ethnicity for the moment, as I will talk about that later). While of course wealthier parents have more opportunities to send their children to private lessons and private schools, these have less of an impact as social class selectors than in other countries. The problems are more subtle:

• After elementary school (which goes up to 4th grade), children are generally sorted into different school types based on their aptitudes, grades - and the evaluations of their teachers. Only one of these school types - the Gymnasium - directly leads to university (though graduates from other schools can get there as well with lots of extra work). And there are plenty of studies that show that children of parents with academic degree will get a recommendation for the Gymnasium far more often than children from poorer or non-academic backgrounds - even if their school performance is identical!
• On most days, school ends at 1 pm - which means that at least one parent needs to be home from work at noon, and that presents difficulties for families where both parents - or a single parent - need to work to make ends meet. While there has been a push to provide afternoon supervision and activities at school, that's still far from universal, with perhaps only 50% of schools offering this service (the actual percentage varies widely by state). Furthermore there is an expectation that parents supervise and assist with the homework of their children - which not all parents are able to (especially if the subjects weren't covered in their former schools) and again provides an advantage to children of parents with an academic degree.

Once you have actually finished school and entered university, your social background doesn't matter all that much any more - there are no tuition fees for public universities in all but two states (and even those will likely abolish them this year), though cost of living can still be a problem if you don't study in your hometown.

Next we come to Male Privilege. I'd say that in Germany if you are a woman you can reach pretty much any position, including that of Chancellor of Germany... as long as you don't have any children. While there has been a push recently for a greater availability of whole day schools and daycare centers, many people still expect one of the parents to stay home in the afternoons and watch over the children... and in most cases, that means the mother. Many will still call mothers who refuse that role "Rabenmütter" ("raven moms"), alleging that they are "abandoning" their children. This attitude is reflected in a recent law pushed through by the Christian Social Union - a junior coalition partner in the current federal government - which gave €150 per months to parents who didn't use their right to daycare and instead kept their children home.

Thus, mothers who stay at home during the afternoons will have to take poorly paid half-day jobs to have any source of income at all - and and demand for jobs accommodating this schedule far outstrips supply. Meanwhile fathers who watch the children for the afternoons will find it almost impossible to find any suitable jobs at all, since men are expected to work for the whole day and not take any breaks from work for their children - which confirms the saying that "The Patriarchy hurts men, too!"

Next we come to Privilege based on ethnicity. The kind of racist prejudice based on idiotic ideas about "racial superiority" found among the Nazis and their kind still exist, but fortunately these represent minority views. There are two "historic" ethnic/religious communities in Germany which have suffered and still suffer prejudice:

• The History of the Jews in Germany is well known, including the horrors perpetrated against them in the Third Reich. Today there are about 300,000 Jews living in Germany (200,000 of them recent immigrants from the territories of the former Soviet Union). In professional and everyday life there is little active prejudice against them - primarily because they are indistinguishable from the rest of the German population - but there are still racist... fuckwits is probably the most accurate term who sometimes vandalize their graveyards and houses of worship.
• The Sorbs are an ethnic group living in parts of Eastern Germany with their own language whose culture has often been suppressed and parts of their territories confiscated - and even today some old wrongs still haven't been addressed, such as continued use of their territory for the open pit mining of coal.

Earlier waves of immigrants - such as the Hugenots, French religious refugees or 19th century Polish immigrant workers - have been absorbed and assimilated into German society and culture and can only be recognized by their family names. They are Germans for all intents and purposes and do not suffer from any prejudice. With more recent waves of immigrants - that is, any that came after WWII - prejudices persist, and they largely parallel the experiences of immigrants to most other wealthy nations. Prejudice and discrimination largely parallel the prosperity the immigrant comes from, with immigrants from wealthier nations being better of. Personally, I'd rank the acceptance of various immigrant groups in the following way, ranging from best regarded to worst regarded:

• Western/Northern Europe, North America
• Southern Europe/Eastern Europe
• East Asia/Latin America
• South Asia, Turkey, Middle East, Africa

This is largely a matter of cultural snobbery than explicitly based on race - for instance, many black Americans noted a marked improvement in the attitudes of the Germans they encountered when they realized that they were from the USA instead of sub-Saharan Africa. Another aspect which can make a huge difference in the treatment of foreigners and immigrants are their academic credentials, as people with graduate degrees are given tremendous amounts of respect in social situations in Germany. Any visitor or immigrant with a PhD should take care to mention this to any German officials they encounter, as this will make them much more helpful and accommodating!

As for discrimination in everyday matters, German laws outlaw discrimination based on ethnicity, but they also don't track ethnicity - there are no government forms or census data on ethnicity, and no explicit affirmative action practices based on it. There are also no steps to prevent discrimination during job applications - it is still customary to include a picture in your job application, and as studies show it still matters if you "look German" or not.

I think this should cover the basics. If you have further questions, don't hesitate to ask!

Some Thoughts on Guns and Gun Control

First, I'd like to explain my own experiences with guns: Like many German men I was drafted into the German military, and I ended up among the Jäger - light infantry. I was trained with pistols, assault rifles, and machine guns (as well as with a panzerfaust, once). So I am familiar with guns and their operations.

Yet I have absolutely no desire to own a gun in my private life, have never felt a need for them for self-defense, and I wouldn't want a relaxation of Germany's gun laws, either (for the record, Germany has about 5.5 million privately owned guns and 1.4 million gun owners, out of a population of 80 million people).

But still, I think the German media are making things too easy for themselves in condemning the American culture of gun ownership. Yes, the American homicide rate is six times higher than the German one. Yes, some aspects of American gun culture can come across as truly bizarre for a German audience (and thus make oh-so-delightful video segments for German news and documentaries). But let us consider for a moment that their circumstances differ from our own, and judge them accordingly.

While I don't believe that a heavily armed populace is a guarantee against tyranny, as it is often claimed (especially since in Weimar Germany heavily-armed militias were one of major reasons for the downfall of democracy and gun control laws were relaxed as democracy declined), I do think the self-defense argument has some merit.

Under what circumstance might it be a good idea to have a gun nearby for self-defense? To my mind, when you are far away from any law enforcement authorities - when the nearest police station that could help you is far away and there is nobody living close enough to be even aware of any attacks so that nobody else will be able to call for help.

Not coincidentally, that describes most of the USA throughout their history - and even today large swathes of U.S. territory fit this description.

In densely populated areas, especially urban ones, this is more problematic - and not coincidentally, this describes most of Europe. While cities were a very useful development in human history and necessary for economic prosperity and increased ecological efficiency, they are also a deeply stressful environment for humans, as we are constantly surrounded by strangers and have few ways of judging their motivations or predicting their actions. As population densities have increased, they have always been accompanied with an increase in the number of written and unwritten rules that the members of a society are expected to adhere to as a way of dealing with those stresses. In low-population areas, it is easy to demarcate one's territory and for others respect it, but in cities our personal spaces and territories are infringed on all the time - thus the instinct to defend one's territory with force becomes deeply problematic, as the accumulated stress makes it more likely that people will make bad choices in such situations.

And of course, the transition from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban society is one of the main forces driving U.S. politics of this generation, which is why this issue is so heavily fought. German media (and European media in general) view this battle purely from the perspective of the densely populated urban culture, which shows in their heavily moralistic tone when reporting on this.

Nevertheless, I believe that the large number of gun-related homicides in the USA are merely a symptom, and are not directly caused by the culture of gun ownership - rather, I feel that the USA increasingly have problems with dealing with their social stresses, and those stresses express themselves in a high homicide rate. Increasing inequality, massive private debts, widespread poverty, the pernicious results of the War on Drugs, lack of trust in the authorities and many other problems add up until parts of the population see no other way but to resort to violence to "solve" their problems - and deaths are the result. But if the USA were better able to deal with their social problems, then I have no doubt that their homicide rate would be much lower in turn.