Hey, are you up for chatting more about Berlin houses? I'm Dutch and my German is ... not too great. But I am mildly interested in it. So if you're up for it, my email is in my profile.
Germany has a very low fertility rate & even immigration isn't enough to make the population grow more than very slowly so if a lot of people moved westwards and into the cities it means a lot of people moved out of the east and the country side.
Also almost the entire country is fairly flat & with a mild climate.
Is population stagnation a problem across Europe? Why not relax immigration requirements? I’m not an expert, but every time I’ve looked getting into Europe seems ridiculously hard. You basically have to have a company agree to employ you and sponsor your visa application, which (as I understand) entails proving why the company can’t find an E.U. resident to do the same job. Plus the salaries are quite a lot lower than the US (roughly 40% lower after factoring in healthcare, vacation, taxes, retirement, etc for software engineering jobs last I checked).
Software just isn't a focus for the German economy, it's more industrial machinery & automotive.
And Germany actually has among the highest amount of immigration in the world so not sure why you think they don't let people in. In my experience it is actually easier to move here than to the US (I'm an immigrant).
The places where it's a problem are those that people leave, like Bulgaria and Romania. There are basically enough "cheap" immigrants available from poorer European countries that the wealthy ones don't need to also additionally increase the rate of immigration from outside Europe.
I was speaking to Europe in general, but good to know about Germany specifically. I was asking about Europe generally because it seems like I’ve heard of a number of European countries struggling with declining populations in recent years, and if it’s a problem throughout the EU, then perhaps the EU would be better off by loosening its immigration requirements.
Yes, we've lived here since 2013 and there has been maybe a week of snow per winter (it was above freezing the rest of the year). It is almost unheard of to have icey roads and sidewalks (which was normal every winter when we lived in Austria before that).
