More and More Leave Germany Behind (brain drain)

[user437490845hjgd]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...446045,00.html

More and More Leave Germany Behind

By Julia Bonstein, Alexander Jung, Sebastian Matthes and Irina Repke

Faced with poor job prospects, high taxes and an intrusive bureaucracy, more and more Germans are choosing to emigrate. Most of those who leave, though, are highly qualified -- which could mean devastating economic consequences.

They are fed up, truly fed up. Fed up with the constant bickering over the costs of wage benefits, social reforms, store closing hours and all the other symbols of a country stuck in bureaucratic and legislative gridlock.

They are tired of living in country where landing a job is like playing the lottery, a country where not even half of citizens live from gainful employment and a country in which even academics in their mid-40s are already considered problem cases when it comes to job placement. In other words, they are fed up with living in a country where all opportunities already seem to be taken: opportunities to succeed in one's career, to own property and to achieve prosperity.

That is why they want to leave -- as fast as they can, in fact -- and move to places where they believe there is hope for a better future. One of those places is the Third World -- India, to be more precise. René Seifert, 35, still raves about Bangalore, India's booming metropolis, where young computer programmers spend their nights crowding into the city's dance clubs and where, during the days, cars share the streets with rickshaws and cows. And where, despite the seeming chaos, every thing has its place. "I'm fascinated by the pulse of Asia, the upbeat prevailing mood and the wealth of opportunities," he raves.

With a few thousand euros in starting capital Seifert, a businessman and former head of entertainment at Internet portal Lycos Europe, founded a company in Bangalore that provides accounting services for mid-sized German companies. He is so enamored of India that he can hardly imagine ever wanting to return to Munich. "Things are really starting to move here," he says.

Frank Naumann, a 38-year-old doctor, fled to Austria with his wife because of "miserable working conditions at home." German doctors, he says, "are in demand from North Cape" -- in northern Norway -- "to the Emirates, so why should I have stayed in Cottbus?"

Naumann worked at a hospital in the eastern German city of Cottbus for six years without ever being offered a permanent contract. Because his chances of being promoted to senior physician were so uncertain, Naumann and his wife decided to move to the Salzburg region, where he now has permanent contract as a senior physician at a hospital in the Austrian town of Schwarzach. Back in Cottbus, doctors are working multiple shifts because the hospital suffers from a shortage of qualified personnel.

Almost everyone in Germany these days knows people like Seifert or Naumann -- people who have decided to make a fresh start in the middle of their lives. Saying goodbye is difficult for almost anyone, but at some point the frustrations and the yearning for a new future become too overwhelming to ignore. Rarely have so many Germans decided to leave it all behind -- their houses and properties, parents and aunts, friends and co-workers. According to the German Federal Office of Statistics, 144,815 Germans left the country last year, a jump of almost 25 percent over 2002. At the same time, fewer and fewer Germans are returning from abroad. The most recent figure is 128,052. For the first time in a generation, more Germans are emigrating than returning. And these are only the official figures.

There are probably just as many who move away without bothering to notify officials in their local municipalities. And those who go are no longer only social dropouts, those seeking a tax haven or celebrities. Nowadays doctors are moving to Norway, engineers to the United States and agricultural experts to New Zealand. Germany is becoming a net exporter of people.

The typical emigrant is in his prime, between the ages of 25 and 45, has had a decent education and is already well into his career. "Those who go are often highly motivated and well-educated," says Stefanie Wahl of the Institute of the Economy and Society in Bonn. But immigrants are a different story altogether. "The people who come here are usually poor, unskilled and have little education."

A paucity of immigrants

This is precisely the problem. Not only are more people turning their backs on Germany, but those who go are typically the country's best and brightest. According to a study by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), hardly any other industrialized nation is losing so many academics to other countries. The percentage of emigrants with doctorates is 10 times as high as it is in the general population. And half of emigrants are younger than 35. "This is a warning sign," Ludwig Georg Braun, the president of the German Association of Chambers of Commerce and Industry, said recently.

Meanwhile, the number of new immigrants is on the decline, and those who do choose to make Germany their home are often not exactly the kinds of workers companies actively seek out. While countries like Australia and Canada restrict immigration mainly to the kinds of people they can truly use, all it takes for someone to immigrate into Germany is proof that they already have family there or are Eastern Europeans of German descent.

It is failed policy with far-reaching consequences. Hamburg economist Thomas Straubhaar warns of what he calls a "DDR effect" if the country loses those who are the most flexible and open to innovation as happened to former East Germany. "Unless we do something about it," he says, "this country's problems will become more severe than almost anyone can imagine today."

The country's pension system is losing contributors just as vast numbers of baby-boomers are gradually entering retirement. The demographic crisis is getting worse, especially when one considers that deaths outnumbered births by 144,000 in 2005, and that this gap is continuing to widen.

Of the just under 12,000 students who enter medical school in Germany each year, fewer than 7,000 end up working in hospitals or private practice. Of those who find employment, about half of them find it outside of Germany, according to the Marburg Bund, the trade association of German hospital doctors. Training these 3,000 or so doctors who end up emigrating costs the government about €600 million -- an expense that ultimately benefits patients in Great Britain, Norway and Switzerland.

Fifty-seven thousand Germans in Austria

Ultimately, such an export of intellectual wealth weakens Germany as a site for investment. Many companies already lack specialized workers today, and 16 percent of German companies are unable to fill all their positions because of a lack of qualified candidates. There are about 7,000 unfilled engineering jobs in the machine building industry alone.

"We cannot simply look on as precisely those people emigrate who are valuable, well educated and motivated," says DaimlerChrysler CEO Dieter Zetsche, referring to what human resource experts call the "brain drain." Zetsche believes that the solution lies in the government changing its approach to immigration policy. "We should encourage people to immigrate who can help us solve our problems."

Some are motivated by a yen for adventure in faraway places. Others are simply fed up with German idiosyncrasies, such as the propensity to constantly come up with new rules where none were necessary in the first place. But the most important motivation is often economic, as Germans facing a lack of career opportunities at home seek to build new lives in places where their skills are still in demand. And that is the case in a surprisingly large number of places in the world.

Australia has launched a campaign to recruit trained professionals from abroad, from hairdressers to mining engineers. New Zealand is also actively looking for qualified workers. But most emigrants are hesitant to move so far away; for them starting anew in a neighboring country is daring enough.

More than 57,000 Germans now work in Austria. And Switzerland is becoming increasingly popular: One in 10 emigrants opts for Germany's southern neighbor, and in 2005 Switzerland was the top destination for Germans emigrating abroad. Danish job recruiters even make the trip to job fairs in Germany to recruit sought-after German professionals.

(article continued to page 2 at link above)
Related: You are under arrest for homeschooling.
Related: Where have all the Germans gone?

I worked for one year (rheology) under a German expat who echoed exactly the above sentiments. His representatives cared more about "wage disparity" than anything else, and he left for greener pastures. My brother worked for 3 years with an expat German woman (photonics), top in her field, who left Germany for the same reasons.

These are the people with skills in enough demand globally that they CAN leave. The rest are stuck, and their growing discontent is registering in troubling ways.

[xer0xed]

That's what happens when you craft a tyrannical society... you lose the greatest minds.

[user437490845hjgd]

John Stossel clip about this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=164x6_LnIpQ

^^ interesting fact about youtube...one of youtube's founders, Jawed Kareem, was born in Germany and left with his family for America.

Some 145,000 people in 2005 emigrated from Germany to other countries, the highest emigration total since 1954, according to latest numbers. Mainly young and well-educated people leave Germany, often for better working conditions, such as scientists researching in the United States; a higher pay check, like teachers working in Switzerland; or better chances to quickly find a job, for example in many of the Scandinavian countries.

See Brain Drain of Europe: Europe's best and brightest scientific minds are leaving in droves for the U.S. — and billions of euros and thousands of jobs are at stake.

When Valerio Dorrello looks around his lab, he sees a miniature European Union. As the afternoon sun streams in, the Italian postdoctoral fellow stands at his sink, changing solutions for one of his experiments. A Spanish colleague, Virginia Amador, pours a gel between glass plates, while a German researcher named Tarig Bashir works on a computer nearby. Their primary investigator, Michele Pagano, is Italian. Two other postdocs are Italian, too, while two more are French. There's such a jumble of languages in the group, which is doing cancer research, that its members have talked about putting up a keyword chart by the telephone with basic phrases in all their languages, "so anyone can say, 'He's not here' in Italian if my mom calls," says Dorrello, punctuating his Neapolitan-accented staccato with laughs. "We're going to make it with flags and everything."

What's not so funny for European policymakers is that this lab isn't in Brussels or Paris or any other E.U. capital. It's at the New York University (N.Y.U.) School of Medicine. All over the U.S., such research facilities are teeming with bright, young Europeans, lured by America's better facilities and meritocratic culture. "In Italy," says Dorrello, "I'd be earning maybe €900 a month." At N.Y.U., he gets nearly three times that. "The U.S. is a place where you can do very good science, and if you're a scientist, you try to go to the best place," says Pagano, who likens researcher migration to football transfers. "In soccer, if you're great, another team can buy you." Science is the same, and the big buyer is the U.S.: in 2000, the U.S. spent €287 billion on research and development, most of that private, €121 billion more than the E.U. No wonder the U.S. has 78% more high-tech patents per capita than Europe, which is especially weak in the IT and biotech sectors.

One of the most worrying signs of their failure is the continued drain of Europe's best and brightest scientific brains, who finish their degrees and pursue careers in the U.S. Some 400,000 European science and technology graduates now live in the U.S. and thousands more leave each year. A survey released in November by the European Commission found that only 13% of European science professionals working abroad currently intend to return home.

The flight of European scientists to the U.S. is nothing new, of course. Political and religious persecution drove luminaries like Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi across the Atlantic. The exodus continued in the 1950s and 1960s, as the U.S. fostered research and created magnetic clusters of scientific excellence, staffing them with the world's best minds and prompting Britain's Royal Society to coin the term brain drain. America's investments laid the foundation for the tech booms of the 1980s and 1990s, which drew yet more entrepreneurial Europeans westward. Europe's bureaucracies, rigid hierarchies and frustrating scientific fragmentation also pushed people away — as they still do to this day. "Europe is a mess," thunders Christopher Evans, a biotechnology professor at four British universities and chairman of the venture-capital firm Merlin Biosciences, "a haze of overregulated and overcomplicated bureaucracies smothering the rare flames of true entrepreneurial brilliance."

Is it really so bad? Europe does have world-class research centers, such as the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, where the World Wide Web was invented, and the Heidelberg-based European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), where 1995 Nobel laureates Eric Wieschaus and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard did their fruit-fly genome research. But complaints like those of Claude Allègre, the former French Education Minister who heads the Paris VII geochemical lab, are all too common. He decries France's anachronistic "Soviet" system, in which control is centralized and researchers must run a bureaucratic obstacle course, whether to buy expensive equipment or order basic office supplies. "I'm planning on moving to the U.S. indefinitely because I want to continue my research," says Allègre. "I can't do so in the current conditions."

Brain drain isn't a purely academic problem. Billions of euros and tens of thousands of jobs are at stake, because science drives economic growth in the IT, biotech and pharmaceutical sectors. Europe can't afford to fall further behind. "Growth in the future will come from industries that are science-based," says analyst Andrew Wyckoff, of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Europe "needs scientists to irrigate them."

Europe will have to add 700,000 new researchers by 2010 and lure back the Continent's scientific expats. In the spring of 2002, after three productive years of research at the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly in the U.S. state of Indiana, Matthias Tschöp went home. Leaving the country he calls "a paradise" for scientists was hard, says Tschöp, who studies hunger-related hormones. "I thought about staying, but I'm German. That's where I belong and where I should contribute."

He landed at the German Institute of Human Nutrition (DIfE) in Potsdam, and the shock set in. As at many German institutions, his colleagues were top-notch, but there was little money, and bureaucracy had a stranglehold on what resources were available. Though he quickly helped to win an €11.7 million E.U. grant for obesity research in collaboration with more than two dozen other institutions, it wasn't enough to overcome his disillusionment. "You had to file a four-page application to get a used computer, only to be rejected because of a mistake in paragraph 342," he says. "I could not deal with all that." He kept a visiting professorship at the DIfE and a role in the obesity project, but headed back to America, where he's now an associate professor in the University of Cincinnati's psychiatry department. He still laughs when he thinks of the $750,000 corporate grant he got for his new lab, staff and travel at Cincinnati. In Germany, he says, "I couldn't even get a start-up grant."

And what if a scientist in Europe tries to cover the shortfall by procuring funds on his own? In some places, that apparently deserves punishment. Michael Krausz, a professor at Hamburg University's Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, accepted research funds from an unnamed drugmaker; German prosecutors are investigating whether he did so in exchange for promotion of its products. Clinic director Dieter Naber, who notes that a 2001 university inquiry cleared Krausz of wrongdoing, wonders how institutes like his are supposed to pay their bills. Industry is an essential source of funding — though in 2000, all E.U. firms combined spent €79 billion less on R and D than U.S. companies — but Germany lacks a clear legal framework for the donor-recipient relationship. "Nearly every contact to industry is being criminalized," Naber says. "Because local governments are bankrupt, we are being asked to procure third-party funding, including funds from industry. But often, when we do so, prosecutors are called in."

Critics also contend that E.U. funds are often doled out by bureaucrats who prioritize social and geographic factors over science. The E.U. claims to have reformed its procedures, but the running joke among funding applicants is still that a Portuguese on the team will lock in money — bonus points if there's a female scientist on board. Such tales typify the Brussels bureaucracy, laments computational scientist Peter Sloot of the University of Amsterdam: "There is a strong administrative and management culture, rather than a scientific culture, in the higher regions of the E.U."

The way European scientists are voting with their feet, I have no doubts that this is an accurate picture. We had an opening a few months ago that was advertised in some European journals, and there were 175 applications, all fairly established PhDs. Oh, and why was it advertised in the European press? Because American public schools are so weak in math and science, and worthless "underwater basketweaving" subjects are so in vogue, that there is a dearth of qualified candidates here.

[laham]

This remind me of a article i read few days ago here in sweden,about high educated immigrants hows living the country because of racism.Companys are choosing natives other the immigrants and because of that sweden are losing billons.

[Shahin]

Originally Posted by laham

This remind me of a article i read few days ago here in sweden,about high educated immigrants hows living the country because of racism.Companys are choosing natives other the immigrants and because of that sweden are losing billons.

They said yesterday on the news that Sweden has the most educated immigrants in the world but most of them can't seem to get the jobs they're qualified for.

[laham]

Originally Posted by Shahin

They said yesterday on the news that Sweden has the most educated immigrants in the world but most of them can't seem to get the jobs they're qualified for.

Jepp thats the truth and people in R&P wounder why there are such high crimes
in europe hmm.