Posted on 02/06/2007 9:46:55 AM PST by george76
Benedikt Thoma recalls the moment he began to think seriously about leaving Germany. It was in 2004, at a New Year’s Day reception in nearby Frankfurt, and the guest speaker, a prominent politician, was lamenting the fact that every year thousands of educated Germans turn their backs on their homeland.
“That struck me like a bolt of lightning,” said Mr. Thoma, 44, an engineer then running his family’s elevator company. “I asked myself, ‘Why should I stay here when the future is brighter someplace else?’ ”
In December, as his work with the company became an intolerable grind because of labor disputes, Mr. Thoma quit and made plans to move to Canada. In its wide-open spaces he hopes to find the future that he says is dwindling at home...
There has been a steady exodus over the years, but it has recently become Topic A in a land already saddled with one of the most rapidly aging and shrinking populations of any Western nation.
With evidence that more professionals are leaving now than in past years, politicians and business executives warn about the loss of their country’s best and brightest.
Among the more popular programs on German television is “Goodbye Deutschland!: The Emigrants,” a 12-part series chronicling several families who have forsaken Germany for South Africa or southern Spain.
The trigger for this latest bout of angst was the release last fall of new government statistics showing that 144,800 Germans emigrated in 2005, up from 109,500 in 2001. At the same time, only 128,100 Germans returned, a decline of nearly 50,000 from the year before. That made it the first year in nearly four decades that more people left than came home.
Germany is not the only European country losing people...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Thank you george, very easy to do in my Banner Maker. It has all kinds of 'effects' to use. Most are very high byte and I delete half of the frames to get them down in file size.
Putting the figure on ahead of time is the hardest part.
That's why most of my German relatives chose to live, work or retire in Spain. I hope you took some short leaves to check out a few of those other countries. We took the overnight FC sleeper from Madrid to Port Noir, and then to Geneve. Damn, now THAT's an expensive place. Our tails were tightly tucked between our legs as we rolled back to Spain en 8 horas. We spent a night in Barcelona instead; we wanted to see where Pink Floyd's big concert inspired their wasted fans to ruin sculptures and other artful things there years before.
I left Europe a year before you moved in.
Wrong. The ones who sneak in are uneducated and a lot are illiterate in their own languages.
If you have a skill and want to become a citizen here, you will learn English to use your skill here. It costs ~3K to hire a lawyer to run the paperwork around. I know a RN from Brazil that moved here last year. She is a CC and RR nurse that will have a Master Degree this year. It's the same science, just different words. After she passed the NCLEX exam, she applied for a work visa after a hospital sponsored her and the immigration card at the same time. The work attachment to her Visa took 3 months. The green card took 6 months longer. That is what an honest person does.
BTW, she and her relatives and friends here (who own a business or are highly skilled) have some words in Portuguese about illegal aliens that mean worse than their English translation. I like people from Brazil. They are strict. Like Germans.
Did you miss the fact that I was speaking about changing immigration rules? There will always be a need for uneducated workers, which is the reason they're here now, and new immigration laws should reflect that. If they do, Shazzam, the border is fixed. No police state, no citizen ID card to prove you're here legally, the border would be fixed.
Hmm. . . pure statist economics collapsed in Eastern Europe and Asia, now the milder version is coming apart in Western Europe.
One wonders why Latin America is so stupid as to think they can make socialism work.
I have often wondered why my great grandfather left Germany and ended up in the plains of Nebraska. Florida and Texas have a lot better weather.
One wonders why Latin America ...Hillary...is so stupid as to think they...she can make socialism work.
It is terribly expensive in Germany. To mail a letter costs $1 vs. 39 cents here. They have the VAT tax of, I believe, 15% added onto everything you buy. I welcome the German immigrants.
If Sarah Brady read this sentence, and it was referring to the US, she would have a brain aneurysm.
And that's a good thing.
"If Sarah Brady read this sentence, and it was referring to the US, she would have a brain aneurysm."
Yeah, and her death would be attributed to gun violence, no doubt.
I Absolutely did not miss your point.
I just stated that an honest person can immigrate here with the intention of becoming a U.S. citizen without problems with the laws just as they are now.
YOU are defending allowing into this country the worst of the worst.
Illiterate criminals in their own countries. Illegal alien child rapists, murderers, drug addicts and various scumbags populate 30% of our prison system that I'm tired of paying taxes to feed.
It's 18, not 14 emergency rooms that have stopped operations in L.A. County or the hospitals file for bankruptcy. Tuberculosis and Whooping Cough have been making a big comeback in the last 3 years. (The nurse I know wears two face masks like she did in Brazil for tropical diseases).
Public schools can't teach your children anything. It is possible to graduate HS without knowing how to read English or do simple math.
This is a point that White Americans and Black Americans can agree and work together on. There is this street in L.A. that no one speaking Spanish is allowed to cross or they will be shot dead.
The Crips and Bloods have joined forces about this.
How many bloody and dead bodies are you willing to see so that your lifestyle is maintained???
I pointed out the obvious fact that we need unskilled workers. The employment rate is very high, and without such workers a large part of the farm economy will just shut down.
Illiterate criminals in their own countries. Illegal alien child rapists, murderers, drug addicts and various scumbags ...
Those people get into the country now, because they mix into all the others coming in illegally. If the "easy way" to get into the country and work is via a border check point, where IDs are checked and those people you mention are denied entry, then it gets to be very easy to prevent them coming in at all. Anyone sneaking across the border will stand out, and would by definition be a genuine bad guy, not someone looking for honest work. Reducing the numbers of people sneaking across to only genuine bad guys makes it easy for the border patrol to catch them.
Public schools can't teach your children anything. It is possible to graduate HS without knowing how to read English or do simple math.
That's right. But since these mexicans will be coming here one way or another, the people wasting their time trying to hold their finger in the dyke of the border should instead be spending their time trying to fix the schools. American schools successfully assimilated a larger percentage of foreign speakers from eastern europe 100 years ago by enforcing English immersion and strong courses in English literature and writing. We should return to that practice. It has been demonstrated to work, while trying to close the border against a tide of millions of people has not.
How many bloody and dead bodies are you willing to see so that your lifestyle is maintained???
My lifestyle will be fine one way or another. Mexicans *will* get here, one way or another. We have a choice to control the flow, and do the hard work to assimilate them, ... or not. You have chosen the later, which is the status quo.
You are the reason that I believe we need a terrorist hit again.
You do know that the 9/11 terrorists didn't sneak across the border, don't you?
Even if that were the case, it would be far easier for them to sneak in from Canada than from Mexico, so using the excuse down south of "terrorism" is just that, an excuse.
Calling for innocents to die exposes your extremism. People tend to ignore extremists.
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