Its varied. I think there was no study that checks that for the whole of Germany, but in my town, most (>90%) of the Syrian refugees from a few years back are now settled down, have a job and and pay social security. A few have high paying jobs (construction, specialized metal-working, etc.), but many of them are in the medium to low income sector. Interestingly, they view food related jobs as high status jobs, whereas German people do not. So many of them are employed in restaurants, etc.
Update: there are of course also other arrivals, but the Syrians make the bulk of them.
It's cheap labor for employers and bad news for German employees who felt the jobs weren't paid enough. The employees who wouldn't work for a "hungerlohn" are forced now as the emplyeers have absolutely no incentive to lower their profit margins, with all the Syrian refugees willing to work for less. I'm sure they're grateful and that they're doing better than in US occupied Syria (Isn't it great how much media coverage the Syrian invasion and civil displacement got?), but it's still an exploitative profit oriented system that's taking advantage of peoples situation.
Edit: Knowing HN, I'll be the one called racist as opposed to the comment right next to me that's saying terrible things about Muslims.
I downvoted you not because you said anything racist but because I strongly disagree with your argument about achieving high salaries through limiting the workforce availability.
The problem with this approach is that, the compensation becomes high for no good reason and since less people are working the output declines. Everything becomes more expensive because the consumption stays the same or higher but the production don't follow. Maybe you make more money by not letting a Syrian immigrant to cook food and compete with you but you also pay more to have your apartment painted because they didn't let some other Syrian immigrant compete in the painting business.
Immigrants that work create prosperity. If you are having trouble competing with a newcomers who barely speak the language, don't know anything of your culture and they grew up in a much poorer conditions in a country with much less opportunities, then it's on you. You should have taken advantage of living in this rich country that has given you all kind of opportunities, if you can't I don't see moral obligation to pay you well just because you are local.
People who want to participate in the society, create value and be compensated for it should not be stopped from doing it just because it might hurt someone else's prospect. This is basically the same argument against technology where some people would argue that we should limit robots and automation so that the workers can keep their jobs.
People are scared of change and don't want competition but if we artificially limit competition, the whole society will end up uncompetitive and catastrophe can happen. Protectionism is very dangerous, look what's happening to VW.
> if you are having trouble competing with a newcomers who barely speak the language, don't know anything of your culture and they grew up in a much poorer conditions in a country with much less opportunities, then it's on you.
I swear I encountered the same argument in Britain after EU enlargement in 2004, when they opened for all citizens of new countries. Cunningly DACH countries fiercely negotiated at that time the longest possible transition periods.
And UK left EU, no new people can come and wages are going up. Are the living standards going up too? Nope.
If you want to see a higher number in the bank account and pay higher numbers for everything, be my guest but that's not going to solve your problems. Inflation is not a saviour.
>If you are having trouble competing with a newcomers who barely speak the language, don't know anything of your culture and they grew up in a much poorer conditions in a country with much less opportunities, then it's on you.
It's funny to blame others for being wage dumped on as being their own fault, as long as it's not your job that's threatened form wage dumping.
So whose fault would it be? Let me rephrase the question: who is picking strawberries from the fields in the UK now?
I recommend everyone to watch the series called "Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole" (mostly available on YT). I don't even blame these people, they are just doing what the system lets them get away with.
That's just pointless whataboutism. Workers being wage dumped on by cheaper more desperate workforce that puts downward pressure on the labor market reducing their power to negociate higher wages, and people choosing to live on the dole because they're fuckups at life, are two different orthogonal issues that are unrelated.
Imagine you graduate form university and apply for jobs where your employer receives 1 resume for every position open. What happens with your bargaining power when your employer can now hire from anywhere in the world without any visa barriers and now receives 200 resumes for the same position?
That's made up word. It's actually competition and everyone has right to compete. If you don't want wages go below some level simply set the minimum wage to that level.
What's next? Are we going to start issuing licenses for using JavaScript because the tech sector slowed and it's easy to learn a JS framework to compete for the available jobs?
> It's actually competition and everyone has right to compete.
Ah yes, the "free market" argument again.
You see, when you can't afford a house anymore because the central bank and government fucked you over and your wages are stagnating thanks to unfair competition from migrant workers, then there's nothing we can do about it it's just the "free market supply and demand".
But when workers' wages start getting too high for employers' linking as he can only get a platinum trim yacht instead of the diamond one, then it's no longer the hand of the free market working in the workers' favor but it's now called a "labor shortage" so all unions must be defanged and immigration barriers must be removed to ease the so called "labor shortage".
> the compensation becomes high for no good reason
Not for no good reason - supply and demand. Literally the most important corner stone of any capitalistic system. The rest of your paragraph is based on your forced assumption of "no reason".
> Maybe you make more money by not letting a Syrian immigrant to cook food and compete with you but you also pay more to have your apartment painted because they didn't let some other Syrian immigrant compete in the painting business.
I'd say you're undervaluing apartment painting. Which is obvious since you're advocating having to fly in people from a destroyed country to do it.
In other words: Low paying jobs wouldn't sit around for long going undone. The market would adjust. Either they're jobs that shouldn't exist in the first place and need to vanish, or they are underpaid and the market would adjust by paying them better.
Try envisioning a world where a person who does a hard shitty job gets paid the same as a highly trained person sitting in front of a PC all day. Cleaning toilets is essential for our society to function and should be a respectable profession. It might not take a lot of education, but it's a hard job none the less The only reason hard jobs like this are not paid what they're worth, is trickery like immigration.
The number might become higher but if the economic output stays the same relative to the population the compensation doesn't become higher.
What would increase the output of the society? Employed people or unemployed people? It's employed people, so as long as the newcomers are employed and produce more than they consume everyone will be better off.
Forget the numbers, those are just for bookkeeping. You are not going to be better off if you you are compensated better due to staff shortages and then pay more due to staff shortages.
> The number might become higher but if the economic output stays the same relative to the population the compensation doesn't become higher.
You're using the word compensation ambiguously. Your sentence is thus nonsense as I cannot parse what you meant. Was that your point?
> You are not going to be better off if you you are compensated better due to staff shortages and then pay more due to staff shortages.
Are you saying that keeping payment low is good for people because it also keeps inflation low? I'm sure everyone will agree and take a pay cut any moment now :)
"Output" is vague and not an agreed upon ultimate goal. Slave colonies have lots of "output".
"Everything becomes more expensive" is vague and unsupported enough to be noise.
"Immigrants create prosperity" is dime store propaganda and noise. It isn't necessarily true nor false. Your presentation of it is negatively persuasive, howerever.
Your statement about "people who want to participate should have the right even if it hurts others" is simply a zero borders argument to permanently bottom out most wages. It isn't a pro technology argument. Couching its opposition as an anti-tech argument is bizarre mental gymnastics that isn't cogent.
"People are scared of change" is a generalized a bullying tactic meant to insult people in case none of your other arguments hit the mark.
Your argument that labor "competition" can't be limited by borders, lest society becomes uncompetitive and catastrophic, isn't born out by the evidence in any productive nation to include Germany. It's also a statement that is embarassed by your thesaurus abuse of alarmist adjectives. Which in turn belie any confidence that your arguments are persuasive.
I think, If you are looking for meaning you should stop picking words individually, claiming stuff about those words and analyse the whole text instead.
I won't call you racist (although your sibling earned a flag), but you have to understand that _right now_ you're wrong. Maybe in 3 years there will be a huge economic downturn, but if Germany missed a year of immigration, they would have had a lot of worker shortage this year. Which is imho crazy, because their energy usage grew way less than their GDP last year, which is like, impossible for any country but Germany and Japan.
You missed elaborating on why you believe me to be wrong.
> because their energy usage grew way less than their GDP last year
Their main energy pipeline got blown up by an unknown assailant last year. They sanctioned Russia and thus stopped importing their energy and switched to US liquified gas for industrial use that's being shipped by ships and thus 2x more expensive. The US slapped another 2x on the price, just because they could.
Even if Germany wouldn't have a minimum wage it wouldn't change the fact that German people won't work for the conditions you outlined. So for Germans this won't change anything anyways. Either the companies lower profits, raise prices or go bust. This way, the companies you're referring to got a few more years until the Syrians become more savvy.
George borjas is an academic that studies this if people are curious. I think the world will come to see economic migration as a sin in the future. It’s a great idea for a generation or two, but then how long?
Well, 90% of the people in my office are immigrants. Pretty productive. Obviously however software engineering has been a very immigrant-heavy industry in Europe for a long time. There's just not enough German software engineers to work the huge capital that it has.
When looking at more common jobs, it's quite hard to find a German when you pass by any construction site. In fact, I can speak to a good amount of the workers in my native language.
>software engineering has been a very immigrant-heavy industry in Europe for a long time
For those unaware, this is commonplace for various industries in the US. The H1B Visa program is a grind-house for companies like FAANG, and I imagine the EU and other European nations have taken note to utilize the same policy.
Than goodness for that. It's a lotto on the stateside for certain which is incredibly tone deaf, but not surprising considering how the rest of our labor force is exploited at nearly every turn.
>> I immigrated from my country => I'm an immigrant.
That's not really the case within the EU at least it's not black and white. You have the same rights as the "native" population. What makes you an immigrat? People in the U.S don't say they immigrate when they move from one state to another...they just move and I think that's the case with the EU as well.
* I didn't speak the language when I moved here. I do now, but I still have a heavy accent that immediately tells everyone I wasn't born here.
* People still casually discriminate against me. I apply with a (fake) German name to apartments. Obviously I use my real name when I meet them and sign the documents, but it has helped me get the foot in the door many times before.
* I did go to school in Germany, and those are the the only Germans I'm friends with. I've made friends with other immigrants, but German society is much harder to break into.
* I can't vote in elections (which is fair, to be clear).
* While I understand German culture now, I don't understand it like a German does. It's kind of hard to quantify the impact of this but while I can understand what's expected of me and why people act in certain ways, it still feels like doing a dance rather than a mutual shared understanding.
All that said.. I feel pretty at place here. Living somewhere for a long time tends to do that. But you still never get over the feeling that you're some guy living in a place, rather than being of that place. It's more of a 50/50.. sometimes you feel as if you've always been there, and sometimes as if you just came that day.
The discrimination is a different issue and depends by many factors.
It's true that you can't vote in national elections but you can vote on local elections[0].
Usually you need just 5 years(on most EU countries)to get the citizenship to able to have this remaining right vote on national elections.
Now my question to you is: are you still an immigrant after you get the citizenship? What's different?
[0] "Every citizen of the Union has the right to vote and to stand as a candidate at municipal elections in the EU country in which he or she resides under the same conditions as nationals of that country."
Left more than a decade ago so Germany feels like home now. Adjusting took a couple years, German culture was difficult to understand. Doing very well now, thank you for the comment.
It is in Berlin, my last software job didn’t have any German developers. That’s how it is in startups. Of course, it’s going to be the opposite in a small town.
All engineers in my company are immigrants, and the official work language is english. Located in Hamburg, serving nearly exclusively German customers.
Contrary to the parent comment and what you will read here: Not very. This won't change for a long time. Syrians from 2015 earn a lot less than the median and more than 70% rely on welfare that pays out more than they earn [1]. Up to 90% of Ukranians rely on welfare [2], costing the German Government half a billion dollars in in welfare checks alone. Marrocans are three times as likely to rely on welfare / to be jobless than Germans [3]. There are three times as many jobless people with a history of migration than Germans [4].
This is not a political agenda. These are just facts.
I saw an article recently that claimed Germany was going to surpass Japan as the third largest economy, aided partially by new arrivals. So I infer they’re pretty productive! Will try to find you a link.
Less than 50% are employed 5 years after arrival, in a country with 5.7% unemployment.
I imagine adults who don't speak the language, require financial assistance, etc, will be a net drain from a tax perspective on a society, esp. when you factor in the high CoL. Its hard enough for the average naturalized citizen to be a net positive from a tax perspective, let alone someone from an entirely different world. An inconvenient/unpopular, but obvious truth.
That data is about refugees. You are conflating new arrivals with refugees, which is not accurate. Some people might think it is even in bad faith.
What about all the other immigrants from EU or abroad whose higher education was not paid by Germany and they immigrate to Germany? Surely that is a positive. Germany is benefiting from paid-by-somebody-else qualified applicants.
> Highly educated immigrants who speak the language
The latter isn't really a requirement, at least when working in tech. I barely speak any German at all in my job, and I'm a German dude working at a German company. All companies I worked for since 2010 had English as "company language", and immigrants were in the majority (mostly from other European countries, but also US and Canada).
And it is 100% Germany's fault. Many of these people could be gainfully employed if not for Germany's beurocracy. I was abroad recently, in South Eastern Europe, and was amazed to see that in some countries there are people working who have no command of the local language, and no command of English either, and communicated in single words and with hand gestures, and they probably did not have valid work permits either. But they were working, gainfully employed and doing their job well enough. The same job (in a bakery) would require a three year trade education in Germany.
I can only agree here, because I saw it with my own eyes. If not for a group of dedicated volunteers in my town, most of the Syrian refugees would just be lost causes. The group organized transportation to job applications (it's in the sticks, no public transport, etc.), helped with paperwork, organized medical care, etc. The responsible authorities are understaffed for the problem and when staffed, you have a chance that the person in charge is actually working against the refugees. Without someone being able to read and understand the local statutes, you'd be lost.
Also your degree gets mostly not accepted for trivial reasons.
I know many engineers etc. working as taxi drivers or dish washers because their (excellent!) degree gets not accepted in DE.
At the same time industry is whining about "fachkräftemangel" - this could be a solved problem tomorrow if politics did not try to block immigrants wherever possible.
Because they're working but not in a way that is recognized by the government data which only recognizes formal labor for a proper employer.
I would go so far as to say that the employment rate is effectively always 95%+ for every population and that the only question is whether people are working in the formal economy, in school, informally working, caring, or doing any number of other activities that make up our human society.
Update: there are of course also other arrivals, but the Syrians make the bulk of them.