← Delayland – Germany and the Missing Magic
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Delay Land.
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Welcome back to Delay Land.
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If you are a regular listener, you'll know we've been a bit down on Deutschland. So in this, our final episode for now, we thought we try to end on a positive note.
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But this also being Germany, and about Germany, nothing is so simple.
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In the first four episodes of Delay Land, we looked at aspects of life in Germany that are broken and in need of fixing. We've talked about rotting infrastructure, inefficient bureaucracy, the slow pace of digitalization, a general.
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Resistance to change, and delays, delays, delays. From delayed trains to delayed action from industry and government.
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But while all we've reported is true, we have come to realize that by accident, we've hit all the popular talking points of the far right.
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Yeah, like everything's broken, big government is to blame and foreigners are killing our industries.
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And this episode is no different, because this time we want to talk about Germany's skilled labor shortage and immigration, which the far right blames for all of the above.
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We do believe that these are problems in Germany and that they need to be addressed in order to solve them. But. And it's a big but. Delayland is not part of Team Doom.
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In fact, based on our research and the people we've spoken to during the making of this whole series of Delay Land, we think immigration and skilled labor from abroad could be part of the solution.
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And it wouldn't be the first time either. We'll talk about it in a bit.
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I'm Nikolas.
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I'm Andreas. And this is Delay Land.
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Germany and the Missing Magic Brought to.
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You by DW Episode 5 the Power of Optimism.
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I'm going to say a number and we are going to say the next number.
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3.
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In a classroom in Chennai, India, the fans are running at full speed. The heat is intense. Some 20 students, mostly young women, are learning German grammar and vocabulary.
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Consumeren is to consume. Grunden is to follow.
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Just a few months ago, they started classes with zero knowledge of German. Now they can already have conversations in the language.
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And speed is important because they've only got half a year to become fluent enough to work in Germany. Their teacher told us after class.
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I'm Deborah Mersi Bai. I'm a German teacher and as well, I'm a nursing professor.
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Deborah's students are all nurses, most of them with several years of experience in the job.
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The life of nurse in India is a challenging thing. Weekly, one day they will get off. Six days. In a week they have to work for more than 8, 9 hours. But for the freshers, the first month of salary is just 12,200.
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12,000. Indian rupees are less than €120amonth or €4 a day.
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My name is Rama Lakshmi and I completed my college in Umiyalache College of Nursing.
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Rama Lakshmi, one of Deborah's students, told us that while her family struggled financially, they did what they could to pay the equivalent of €1,500 per year for her nursing tuition. And she wants to give something back.
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My only aim is I want to work in abroad and financially. I want to settle my family and I want to build my own house.
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After college, Rama Lakshmi first started working in a hospital in her native state of Tamil Nadu in India's southeast. During her second year as a nurse, she stumbled across a post on Instagram advertising a German language program especially for nurses.
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The course was free, paid by a government agency, the Tamil Nadu Skill Development Corporation. Reduce unemployment at home by giving people from unprivileged backgrounds a chance to profit from skilled labor shortages in other countries like Germany.
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Another student called Aisha told us that as a Muslim person in a predominantly Hindu society, she had to put up with discrimination and stereotypes. She was inspired to go abroad by a friend who was already working as a nurse in Germany and told her life was good there.
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She's, like, very happy. She's telling there is no stress. The hospital and the peoples are very polite and very friendly. Everyone is treating you like super. So that I thought, I want to be a happy life and I want to be a peaceful life. I want to go there and I have to learn the cultures. It's better to go there.
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Aisha also wants to earn a better salary than in India. After three years as a nurse at a big hospital in Chennai, Aisha said she was earning €240amonth. Average entry level wages in Germany are around €3,000.
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But life is also more expensive here.
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True.
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Their German teacher, Deborah was never interested in leaving India to work abroad herself. But her brother was. More than 10 years after he left India to study in Germany and find work in a bank, Deborah said she felt the move had changed him.
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Oh, my God. Oh my God. I miss him so much. Whenever we ask him, what are you doing? Why you are not calling us? The one answer is, no time. I just wonder. People in Germany will not find time to talk to their parents. Is that true?
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The stories we heard from Rama Lakshmi, Aisha and others in Chennai are similar to stories in many other countries. From Brazil to Colombia, Vietnam, Tunisia, and many more.
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Germany has partnerships with all these countries. The aim is to attract skilled workers from these countries to work here.
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But if you follow the Leyland, you might be wondering, why would anyone want to come to Germany if everything is broken and no one is doing anything to fix things?
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And it would be a fair point. I mean, we've done a lot of complaining in the making of this podcast.
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That said, the healthcare system works.
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You can walk home at night and.
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Feel safe, and you can say what you think anytime, anywhere.
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Okay, the German language is hard to learn, but once you've got it, you can say what you like, or at least most things.
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But what about the weather? Ouch.
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Maybe that's why Germany has a shortage of skilled workers. Everyone's left for warmer countries. The German government is launching a range.
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Of measures to attract skilled workers from abroad. In other news, it aims to combat.
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The growing worker shortage in the country.
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It's a move that companies say is long overdue. The country's aging workforce is a growing liability. While positions in IT and software development, for example, are becoming notoriously hard to fill, the country's desperate for skilled workers from abroad. According to a study by an established research institute, Germany was short more than half a million skilled workers in 2024.
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Hospitals don't have enough nurses and doctors.
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Childcare centers lack educators. Schools are missing teachers.
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The construction industry is short on workers.
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The IT sector needs software developers and.
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IT specialists, plus electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, you name it. Every sector has huge gaps to fill. If outskilled labour from abroad, we would either have to adjust at other margins, like the employment of older workers, or our economy would be in a worse shape.
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This is Michael Oberfichtner, based at the Institute for Employment Research in Nuremberg.
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The idea of filling gaps in the labor market with workers from abroad is not new at all. As we've mentioned, at the start after.
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World War II, Germany experienced what historians call an economic miracle. It was in the 1950s, 60s and early 70s when people rebuilt the country. The economy grew rapidly, and very soon it was felt that Germany needed workers from other countries to keep the growth going.
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And they came. They came from all over Europe and beyond. From Italy, Spain and Portugal, from Greece, Turkey and the former Yugoslavia. From Morocco, Tunisia and South Korea. They came to Germany to build cars, produce steel, mine coal, nurse the sick and build homes.
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In order to secure a steady stream of new workers, the Germany's then government signed official recruitment arrangements with several countries. Until 1973, when this policy was phased out, 14 million people had come to work in Germany.
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They were called Gastarbeiter Guest workers because Germany assumed they would leave after a few years and return home. But many stayed. They built their lives here. Their children grew up here, and their grandchildren.
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Today, almost every third person in Germany has what is called a migration background. That means they or one of their parents were born in another country.
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Germany's economic miracle would have been impossible without workers from abroad. And to this day, the country's economy would not function without them. And it's not just the economy. Germany has grown culturally as well.
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True, but there is something else. Germany's population is aging fast. Birth rates are low, Rates of retirement are high, and people are living longer.
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Labor economists estimate that Germany needs to attract 300,000 skilled workers from abroad each year just to maintain the status quo.
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Without that additional migration, the argument goes, people in Germany will have to work longer hours or retire later or simply be poorer. But Germany's bureaucrats are not making things easy for people who want to move here, study, work, and perhaps settle down.
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And then you hear the music.
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All.
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The time, for hours.
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Yeah, that's Zara. And what she's cheerfully singing here is the music from the hold line of a German immigration office.
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Every time you call, they say, wiesen unterbeesec. We don't have enough employees. It gets very emotional because you're like, okay, you keep saying, we don't have enough people. Here I am. I want to do it. Just let me, you know.
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In episode four of delayland, we made light of how annoying it can be that it's almost impossible to access public services digitally in Germany, like when Nicholas had to register his new address at City Hall.
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But for Zara, delays at her city's immigration office are more than just a joke. They are a matter of survival. Zara is from Iran, but studied at university in Germany. When she completed her degree, she was eager to join the workforce and start paying taxes for that aging population of ours. But she hit a delay.
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Herzlich wilkommen beim Auslander amt.
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It took almost a year until I get an appointment for extending my visa and basically changing my visa from a student, which was not the case anymore, to a working visa.
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Eventually, Zara was allowed to start work. She speaks fluent German. She teaches at universities and works in research, but she has not been granted a permanent work permit.
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We're not using her real name here because Zara doesn't want to run into any trouble with the authorities by speaking to us.
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Sara's work permit is limited and very specific. She needs to get in touch with authorities Whenever something changes, such as when she was offered a second part time.
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Position, I was so scared that this will take long and then I will lose both jobs. And I really like these jobs that I went to a lawyer and I just basically gave the case to the lawyer so it goes faster. So it took one month with the lawyer. I don't know how long it would have taken if I didn't have a lawyer.
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While Sara was waiting for the decision, she wasn't allowed to work. She lost a month of income and in addition, she had to pay the lawyer.
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But she said the investment was worth it because she wants to stay in Germany until we reminded her of the bureaucracy.
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Especially in these hard times. Sometimes I'm thinking, do I actually want to live here? Do I want to go through this once a year? That's more my consideration. When these difficult times come and then when they are gone, then I push them under the rug and forget about them. But yeah, sometimes I do think, do I want to live here?
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Zara wants to build a life here, but she feels like the authorities treat her as if she's a risk, not a resource.
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That's why she has to laugh when we talk about Germany's shortage of skilled workers.
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I don't know, I'm thinking, are you kidding me? Like, there are a lot of people who actually would like to do it. But I don't know if I have the choice between Germany and somewhere where things are a bit easier. Things don't take so long. Like some friends of mine who migrated to Canada, they already have their citizenship station, and I still have to go there after six and a half years and go through this process.
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My name is Bjorn Meibom. I'm a migration lawyer in Germany since 2004. We are helping people to come into Germany, especially skilled workers, to get their residencies here and help them with the bureaucracy and the German administration.
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Bjorn's law firm sits in a sleek glass building on the banks of the Rhine in Cologne. They've got more than 20 employees to handle 2,000 cases a year.
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We have doctors, we have nurses, we have engineers, we have truck drivers, all kinds of branches.
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But why do they all need lawyers when the country needs them and their labor? Germany's public administration cannot keep up. People like Zara often wait months before their rights, which are written in law, are recognized.
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Unfortunately, it's all over the country. It's quite the same. Just one more employee in the administration would help so many other people to come in and do their jobs. So it would really make sense to have more people working there and that would improve so much in our country. Germany's migration offices are understaffed and unable to meet the demand for their services. They are the go to authority for all non German citizens in the country, whether they are skilled workers or refugees. And in the past decade, Germany has taken in more than a million refugees, most of them fleeing the civil war in Syria.
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And the war in Ukraine has seen another million people seek refuge here.
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By comparison, only 160,000 skilled workers have been able to settle here in that same time, according to the most recent figures.
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Now, we are not saying that skilled workers are more important than helping refugees fleeing war, but these crises have left migration authorities struggling with increased workload, which results in those massive delays.
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Digitalization could speed things up, but we know from episode four of Delay Land that Germany's administration is a bit backward in this regard.
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It's one of the many examples that show all the individual hold ups we talked about in delayland are interwoven. For the record, we did approach city administrations for comment. We asked them why do applications by skilled workers like Zara's take so long to process?
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They told us they couldn't comment on individual cases without all the details. They did, however, say that there was a backlog of applications which they were trying to reduce.
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If Germany's administration does not get its act together, some people will just move on and work elsewhere, bjorn, the migration lawyer, told us. And it will be the people Germany wants most. Those with the highest qualifications, the most wanted skills, those who can choose. We will get there after these short messages.
- [17:48]
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Clarity is a competitive advantage, especially when it comes to the economy. That's because anybody can know what's happening, but understanding why it matters is crucial. Hi, I'm Kai Ryssdal, the host of Marketplace. We provide the context you need to understand how the economy influences our everyday.
- [18:04]
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Lives, from our local communities to the global conversation.
- [18:08]
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You'll be smarter every time you listen. And these days, that's priceless. Listen to Marketplace on your favorite podcast app. Narvel Morso is one of the most famous indigenous artists ever. Looking at his paintings, it's easy to see why.
- [18:23]
A
Colors are intense.
- [18:24]
B
Color is medicine. But look a little closer and you'll see something else. Fakes we believe it's the world's biggest art fraud. There are thousands of fake Nour Val Morisot paintings beneath some of these forgeries. Assaults, abuse, and even an unsolved murder.
- [18:40]
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I want my paint back. I know you killed that boy.
- [18:44]
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Forged Available now wherever you get your podcasts.
- [18:50]
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Now back to Delay Land. If Germany's administration does not get its act together, some people will just move on and work elsewhere, Bjorn, the migration lawyer, told us. And it will be the people Germany wants most, those with the highest qualifications, the most wanted skills, those who can choose.
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Of course, we're in a competition and if you let people wait for months or even weeks, a year, and meanwhile they are learning language, German, and finally they even have to go to the courts in order to get their visa, that's just frustrating.
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And that's not the message we should.
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Send in the world for the people that they have to go to the courts to get into Germany. This was Germany back in 2015. Open arms and open hearts for refugees. Now closed doors and rising tensions in 2015. Then Chancellor Angela Merkel said, jam so filers Geschaf Verschafentas. We can do it. She was celebrated and judged.
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What did she do? She's in the process of destroying Germany.
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The Alternative for Germany party nearly doubled.
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Its support, the strongest showing for a far right party since the Second World War. Russia's invasion of Ukraine triggered a sudden and massive humanitarian exodus. Since February, more than a million Ukrainian men, women and children have registered with authorities here in Germany. Support for the far right Alternative for.
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Germany, or AfD, is increasing. A new poll shows the party at 25%. Refugees and migrants feel increasingly unwelcome here in Germany, according to a new study.
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We've mentioned that since 2015, the number of refugees from war torn countries like Syria and Ukraine has risen sharply in.
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Germany, and that has led to a rise in the number of populist politicians, an increasingly polarized public debate and growing divisions in German society.
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Anti immigrant rhetoric is on the rise, not just in Germany, it has to be said, but in Germany. The AFD party has made migration the core of their political program. AFD stands for Alternativa fur Deutschland, or Alternative for Germany. The party won more than 20% in the votes in the 2025 federal election and became the second strongest party in the national parliament.
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The AfD's success has prompted politicians in other parties to emulate some of their positions, especially on migration.
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And in this time of economic difficulties, more and more people have started to blame migrants and refugees for all of Germany's problems.
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We are on the autobahn to visit a clinic, a clinic that has actively been trying to recruit nurses and other medical personnel from outside of Germany because they need skilled workers.
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Yeah, and the interesting thing is that we're going to meet a nurse from India, actually from Chennai itself.
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Chennai, the place we've been visiting?
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Yeah, and the place we've been meeting. Also other nurses that wanted to go to Germany and they had pretty high expectations. Do you remember?
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Yeah, I remember. One said that she was hoping that the work would be less stressful and that people would be more friendly to to her. The Bedeja Clinic in Falindar near Koblenz, halfway between Frankfurt and Cologne. It's a specialized hospital for neurobiological rehabilitation. Patients come here to recover after a stroke or an accident. For example.
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Kailee Rajiville is doing the rounds and checking up on patients in their rooms. She's from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. And just like some of the nurses we talked to in Chennai, she was inspired to go to Germany by a friend who was already working there as a nurse.
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Everything he told me about Germany turned out to be true. It's exactly like he said at the beginning. It was really difficult, especially with the language. But my boss and my colleagues, they all helped me and the other nurses a lot. And when we made mistakes, they did not get angry at us. They just explained it again. They respect us.
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Kajav Lee had only been in Germany a few months when we met, and she said she has not experienced racism or discrimination at Falandar, but she's aware that other people do. Her boss, Joerg Bibrach, said their partners in India are aware of it too. Our small town still seems like an ideal world, but we have facilities in five federal and we hear from colleagues there that this is increasingly becoming an issue. This has also been noticed in India. We are increasingly being asked about political developments, including the different parties. Joerg is head of nursing at the clinic in Falinda. In the past few years, he's hired a growing number of nurses from India, usually with the help of specialized agencies like CURA Personnel.
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These agencies recruit healthcare professionals in India for hospitals in Germany. Some also organize language trainings and take care of paperwork like visa applications.
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Joerg said his clinic pays agencies between €7,012,000 for a successful placement. But the more challenging part is to make new employees feel welcome. Only then will they want to stay longer than their usual two year contract. To think you just get skilled workers from another country, assign them an apartment and award, and you're good to go. Doesn't work. It's a very long process and many employers fail to get it right.
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Over the past years, the clinic in Falanda has hired around 40 nurses from India and Sri Lanka. As head of nursing Joerg has seen it all. Homesick nurses who missed their families, husbands who didn't want their wives to be in Germany, and those who wanted to join their wives but couldn't get a permit.
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Then again, there are nurses like Axa Abraham from the South Indian state of Kerala. Axa and her husband, who works in it, manage to move to Germany together.
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The two professions had lot of opportunities here. That's why we choose Germany. We would like to stay in Germany and we would like to bring our parents here after citizenship. Yeah.
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Their daughter was born in Germany. She's now 2 and goes to kindergarten when her parents work.
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But not every story runs as smoothly as Axa's. Joerg, the head of nursing at the clinic, describes his overall experience with foreign nurses as positive but challenging. So they're trying a new approach.
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They now recruit people fresh out of high school who are already able to speak some German.
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Then they do an apprenticeship to become nurses in Falander. This usually takes three years and combines school and on the job training. After three years in the German health system, they have completed their training. And usually they are also quite fluent in German by then. And most of the new colleagues are not yet married, so there are fewer challenges with spouses and children.
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Training nurses in Germany could speed up the hiring process, which now takes up to nine months. It would also get rid of the need to have foreign qualifications checked and recognized by the authorities.
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This process is a constant source of headache for Joerg, since the rules vary in each of Germany's 16 federal states. States, which is a problem in its own right. As we've discussed before on delayland, Everybody says we need skilled workers, but we are still a long way from a welcoming culture and everything running smoothly. The process needs to be faster and more uniform. Only then will we be more attractive compared to other countries. And there it is again. The idea that Germany needs to be faster and more uniform to get fit for the future or even just fix its problems today. It all comes down to people, whether they are skilled workers from abroad or those born and bred in Germany. And more than anything else, it's our thinking, the way we do things, that needs to change.
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Some industries, they are working around the slow bureaucracy in Germany by taking the work to the workers.
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That's especially true for it for software development and programming for these jobs, location doesn't really matter. You can do it from anywhere.
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Take German carmakers, for example. We talked about them in episode two of delayland. They're all trying to make their cars more digital, more connected and to use AI. And for that they have opened IT hubs where they find the talent.
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Volkswagen has centers in California, Silicon Valley in Tel Aviv, where a lot of Israeli startups are based, and also in China and India.
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Mercedes is there as well, but also in cities in Japan, China and India.
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So is BMW. Their lineup of international IT hubs includes the us, Portugal and Romania, and Europe, South Africa, China and India.
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Did we just say India? Several times.
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We did, didn't we? But then again, India, like China, is a good example for countries that have made changes fast, changed mindsets and leapt forward, and in some cases overtaken Germany.
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So we may as well head back one last time.
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So, early morning in Bangalore, India, and we are on our way way to BMW Tech Works.
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That's a joint venture between the Bavarian car manufacturer and an Indian company, Tata Technologies.
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And they are working on IT solutions. Specifically, they want to improve the software of their cars and also management software for the company. So they're focusing on IT here in Bangalore, which is also called the Silicon Valley of India.
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BMW Tech Works India is the latest addition to what the carmaker calls their international IT and software hubs. It started in 2024 and is set to grow at a rapid pace heading into 2026. The goal was to have more than 1,000 employees there.
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It's certainly easier than finding 1,000 IT professionals in Munich, where BMW's headquarters are, or getting them to move to Germany from elsewhere with all the paperwork involved.
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Oliver Schaikel heads a section called Digital Car at BMW Tekworx. IT focuses on the software used in the cars for assisted driving and connectivity. Oliver told us that compared to Munich, it's easy to find huge numbers of talented IT specialists in Bangalore.
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Bangalore is a huge city and talents are absolutely available here. But we also noticed that we are not the only company who is currently going to India and building teams here. There is definitely competition in the market, while in Munich we also have lots of strong IT players. I think the competition is harsher here.
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As employers, they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Large industries often get accused of exporting jobs to save on salaries. But that's not the case when competition is as rife as IT is. In India's IT sector, for instance, people.
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Start with really, really low salaries, fresh.
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Out of university, but then they expect salary increases year after year, which are much higher than what we are used to. So I would say in Munich you start higher, but the growth rates are not as steep. Here you start really low, but then the expected growth rate is much higher. So the one real saving is on.
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Bureaucracy and a win because of the cultural exchange. By engaging with expertise in different parts of the world, German industry is slowly starting to learn to see, think and do things differently. Back home in Germany, we kept thinking about the different challenges and it or the car industry face compared to nursing. Car makers don't have to wait for the government or any administration to get its act together. They can move their innovations elsewhere to have them developed.
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Yeah, but you can't move the sick or elderly to India or wherever else we find nurses and doctors. The nurses and doctors either have to be resident and trained here already, or we have to attract those skilled workers from abroad. Same goes for teachers and the rail system. Laborers and engineers have to come here to fix the local network.
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Yeah, but Andreas, this being the last episode of Delay Land for now, how optimistic are you in all that we've seen and discussed? Are there reasons to be hopeful?
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Of course there are. I mean, I've always been an optimist. And that's why we thought of delayland, wasn't it not only to complain about problems, because to be fair, life is great in Germany, but we've also investigated those problems to look for solutions and to get inspiration from other places. How about you, Glass? Half full or half empty?
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I don't like to admit, but I have a tendency to be a pessimist, honestly. But here comes the but. What really inspired me was this spirit of Notre Dame.
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Do you remember La Vie en Rose?
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A
That idea that you can achieve great things if you work as a team, if you're optimistic and if you identify with the task.
- [33:45]
B
So you're saying we should all identify more with Germany because that's the task it has?
- [33:50]
A
No, not exactly. But sometimes it just feels that we've gotten so comfortable over the past decades in Germany that it's become too hard to change. We're full of angst and we don't even have a vision. Change comes from crisis or passion and not from division.
- [34:07]
B
Alright then, but let's not delay the inevitable. This is the end of this season of Delay Land. We gotta wrap it up. How about we come back in six months or a year and see how things have changed? Deutsche Bahn's renovations are still ongoing and apparently the opera house in Cologne is still scheduled to open.
- [34:26]
A
Yeah, someday soon, Delay Land is a going concern.
- [34:32]
B
If you want to hear more from us at delayland, get in touch. Share your stories of delays and frustrations, hopes and inspirations. Or if you want us to investigate a story where you live, let us know.
- [34:44]
A
Write us an email to delaylandw.com and leave us a comment on the podcast platform of your choice and recommend us to your friends. It was great having you.
- [34:55]
B
You too, Nico.
- [34:56]
A
No, I meant the audience. Germany and the Missing Magic is a DW production, researched, written and produced by us, Andreas Becker and Nicolas Martin.
- [35:12]
B
Our editor was Zulfika Abani.
- [35:15]
A
Sound design by Warner Poland Audio editing and mixing by Simon Berkhan Executive producer, Judith Hatl. Special thanks to Thomas Neufeld, Ashutosh Pandey and the whole DW business team and the DW Hindi department.
- [35:30]
B
People who contributed to this the DW.
- [35:34]
A
Tamil Nadu office in Chennai. Special thanks to our dear colleague Gunavati Manavalan, Stefan Haluza of the Indo German Chamber of Commerce, Tasneem Zahra and Neil King.
- [35:45]
B
Cover art Nova Charlotte, Tom and Alex.
- [35:48]
A
Anka Yordan Marketing Sam Baker and Sachin Sharma.
- [35:53]
B
If you like this podcast hit subscribe. Leave us a comment on your favorite podcast platform and tell your friends about it.
- [36:02]
A
Thanks for listening and come back next time.
- [36:15]
B
Global business isn't just charts and suits.
- [36:17]
A
It's a messy, unpredictable soap opera set on a global stage.
- [36:22]
C
Hi, I'm Daniel.
- [36:23]
B
And I'm Cassandra.
- [36:24]
A
If you think the economy is boring.
- [36:26]
B
You'Ve been watching the wrong show. In our weekly podcast, the Dip will.
- [36:29]
A
Help you connect the dots. That's DW's the dip, available wherever you get your podcasts.