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What you hear is wrong. German border controls are mostly non existent. In a physical way. Drive over the border and you are in Germany. No fence. No controls.
by lispm 12y ago
What you hear is wrong. German border controls are mostly non existent. In a physical way. Drive over the border and you are in Germany. No fence. No controls. Border controls are down to a minimum.
Poland is next to us. No one in Poland needs a visa. There are no real border controls between Poland and us.
The Czech are next to us. No one needs a visa. No real border controls.
France is next to us. No real border controls. Nobody needs a visa. We even have the same currency.
Everybody in the EU (505 million people) can work move and work everywhere (mostly). Nobody needs a visa.
Even from countries where a visa is needed, moving to Germany and staying illegal is relatively easy.
And so on.
- qwerta 12y agoGerman road police bullies Czech and Polish drivers a lot. 'Random' road control means that entire content of car ends up on the road. And while German society is relatively open, you need fluent German language with NO ACCENT to be fully accepted, it is very far from US or UK.
- jcbrand 12y agoWhat does "fully accepted" mean? Where I live, there are a lot of immigrants and I hear non-native accents all the time. At JS meetups, in shops, trains, offices, all over the place. I'm in Germany and don't speak native-level German, and my impression is that the Germans are very open and tolerant to foreigners.
- qwerta 12y agoIt is about long-term live. There is sort of glass-ceiling for emigrants in job promotion. And mostly older people are uncomfortable around people from post-soviet countries.
- lispm 12y ago> German road police bullies Czech and Polish drivers a lot. 'Random' road control means that entire content of car ends up on the road. Where I live, I have never seen that at all. Even then, if the police does not find anything, Czech and Polish drivers are perfectly fine to drive on German streets. Since they are in the EU, they can freely live and work in Germany - they just need to follow the usual German and EU laws. That's also not important in this context. Prostitutes from east european countries can easily move into Germany. It also does not matter if they speak German or not. Most speak enough German to be able to work here in their business. > And while German society is relatively open, you need fluent German language with NO ACCENT to be fully accepted, it is very far from US or UK. The is no requirement to have no foreign accent to live in Germany. The city where I live has around 13% population which doesn't have a German passport. That's the official numbers. Then add people who are living illegal and people who have passports from more than one country.
- oakaz 12y agoYou must be a joke. Germany is where it's a casual thing to burn minorities alive. I'm not even talking about the holocaust; 2008: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/02/fire-f12.html http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/02/fire-f12.html 1993: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solingen_arson_attack_of_1993 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solingen_arson_attack_of_1993 More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Germany http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Germany And as a minority in Oakland, I feel like home and I know enough horror stories to avoid visiting Germany as long as I don't have a good reason.
- qwerta 12y agoThis is just total bullshit. Germany has 80+ millions people and what you referred are very isolated accidents. German Turks are doing MUCH better than any minority in America. And I am SICK of racist stereotypes about Germans. Yes their police does profiling and people from post-soviet get less promoted, but this also applies to East-Germans! What I was talking about is not racism, but sort of conservatism.
- oakaz 12y agoDo you even ask that to the minorities or you just speak for them?
- gambiting 12y agoYeah I do not understand what is going on with HN today. Half of the comments here are showing Germans as some racists bastards with tight border controls - when the reality couldn't be further from the truth. And I am not even German.
- IsTom 12y agoNever seen that happen and we drive to visit our futher familiy there every other month.
- lispm 12y agoI read that the Ferguson police was mostly white. Seems that someone was not fully 'accepted'. Immigration from eastern europe makes a lot of people in the UK unhappy. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-24924219 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-24924219 http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/british-welcome-of-immigrants-wears-thin/2014/01/07/25f2b560-7568-11e3-bc6b-712d770c3715_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/british-welcome-o...
- brodo 12y agoGerman road police does also bullie young people in crappy cars alot. And long-haired man. And people with tattoos. If you've living in a country where the police does not do 'random' searches based on stereotypes, please tell me and i'll move there. gg The 'you need to speak without accent to be fully accepted' thing is also clearly wrong. I know lot's of examples for well integrated immigrants who don't speak without an accent and I bet every german who did not grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere does know at least one immigrant from turkey.
- ubernostrum 12y agoAnecdotally, I spent most of July traveling around western Europe, entirely by train. Passing between other Schengen countries? No problem, you don't even know you crossed a border unless the conductor announces it. But at the German border the train stops, the crew is changed, sometimes the locomotive is changed, and on one train the police came on board at the border and asked to see everyone's identification. Other countries, the crew also just checked tickets shortly after boarding, then marked down "checked that seat, they're going to this place". Of the multiple trains I took in Germany, only one did that; the rest had the crew checking everyone after every major stop, to the point that I finally just left my ticket sitting in my lap so I wouldn't have to keep getting it out of my bag. So I would say that of the countries whose borders I crossed -- Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands -- Germany was by far the one with the most border controls. In fact, it was the one that had border controls. (also the German trains had the highest rates of delay and malfunction; I did one six-hour trip to Berlin on a train which had no food available, and another six-hour trip on a different German train where the air conditioning didn't work, on a sunny day over 30C, and missed a connection to a TGV because the ICE was running nearly 30 minutes late)
- lispm 12y agoTicket control has nothing to do with border controls. In every train in Germany, if the crew is changed, they will control your ticket. They say 'Personalwechsel' and control the tickets again. You don't need a passport, visa, or whatever to buy a ticket and no train crew is controlling your passport. They are also NOT authorized to see your passport. If you don't have a valid ticket, they will ask for your passport for identification purposes. You don't have to show it. They will then call the police, which you then HAVE to show your passport. The train crew only looks at the passport, if you used it online to buy a ticket, using the passport number as an identification number. So they check the online ticket and look at the passport number. But you can use other ways of checking for a correct online ticket (using your credit card number for example) and you can buy your ticket also offline. It also does not matter for 505 million EU citizens. The police may control your passport. But that's it. ALL 505 MILLION EU CITIZENS ARE ALLOWED TO TRAVEL AND WORK IN GERMANY WITHOUT VISUM. Details: http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=457&langId=en http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=457&langId=en
- oakaz 12y agoThat is privilege to some countries, rest of the countries are just like what I wrote. There is even songs that tell how German officers behave in the border. You may not understand this as an insider, but you need to listen others instead of ignoring.
- ginko 12y agoPrivilege to some countries as in the Schengen region? Well, of course. Do you expect anyone from anywhere to be able to pass the German border and work there at will?
- sgift 12y agoAnd how many of these song were written in the last 25 years? Times have changed, check your facts.
- lispm 12y agoThis is no privilege. It is the right of every of the 505 million EU citizens. German border officials are usually very professional.