I wondered about this so I sought confirmation. I found it at this place and here.Aug. 29 (Bloomberg) -- 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.
``Many highly qualified young people are leaving our country to seek their fortunes elsewhere, while only very few top people have been attracted to Germany in recent years,'' said Ludwig Georg Braun, president of the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce, which represents more than 3 million companies. ``This development is causing us growing concern.''
Merkel's Government
Unemployment reached 5.2 million, the highest level since World War II, in February 2005. Joblessness has declined since Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats took office last November. Still, the unemployment rate stood at 8.2 percent in June, according to internationally comparable figures published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. By the OECD's reckoning, the jobless rates in neighboring Austria and Switzerland were 4.9 percent and 4.3 percent, respectively.
While polls show that Germans regard unemployment as the nation's most pressing problem, they also show little confidence in Merkel's ability to tackle it. Three-quarters of 2,501 respondents in a July 12 Forsa poll said they didn't expect the government to be able to solve it, and that sentiment may drive even more workers to look outside the country.
``People say things aren't getting better in Germany, and nothing's going to change any time soon,'' said historian Simone Eick, director of the German Emigration Center in the northern port city of Bremerhaven. Indeed, ``some indicators suggest that this may be the start of mass emigration.''
`No Future'
That's reflected by the 630 postings recorded since Aug. 10 on an Internet forum on emigration hosted by Germany's Spiegel magazine. 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.
``I only get 25 percent deducted from my salary and that includes everything,'' said Koerber of his pay packet in Canada. ``And I'm in the highest tax bracket!'' The goods and services tax in Alberta is 6 percent, cut from 7 percent in July, he said.
`Over-Regulated'
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.''
The German government makes no attempts to curb emigration and encourages the free movement of labor. In fact, the Federal Labor Agency has a cross-border job placement-unit for qualified workers that helped 12,702 Germans find work abroad last year, a 39 percent jump from 2004.
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.
Marlene Dietrich
In the past, most German emigrants went to the U.S., among them Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who sailed from Europe in 1777 and went on to train George Washington's army at Valley Forge, and actress and singer Marlene Dietrich, who left in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power.
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.''
So now I ask our European posters and everyone else, do you think this is the eginning of a trend? Why or why not?
