Personal rather than work post, about my experiences of migrating to Germany, written a little over a year after I thought I was going to be deported and in a deeply unsettling political climate across many countries. I have found that many people find it quite eye-opening when I relate how hard getting legal status in Germany was for me – even for someone like me, with a lot of advantages on my side. And it sometimes prompts other people to share their stories – again, usually coming from a position of advantage, but still experiencing grim treatment. These stories, of course, don’t capture the full experience of those who are migrating with very very few advantages; but they maybe provide a tiny insight, and a better view of this word “migrant” than just a political term. So, despite some discomfort, I’ve written a piece about my experiences.
I am one of the roughly 30% of people in Germany who are Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund – people with migration background – and one of the roughly 19% who are first-generation immigrants. It still feels occasionally odd to refer to myself as an immigrant, or a migrant. Many people, myself included, would commonly use the word “expat”, which indicates a series of advantages I have over other migrants – my ethnicity, class, social and financial capital, qualifications, native English etc. But nonetheless, I am happy and proud to refer to myself as a migrant. Partly because it wasn’t the easiest experience – as I’ll relate.
I mention this preamble because I want to be clear; I’m not saying I’m somehow representative of the experience of migrants. No one person can be – that’s kind of a central point of migration - but I also came with a lot of advantages. And despite that, the experience was still grim. I also don’t want to distance myself too far from a word, "migrant", that is becoming increasingly slandered in politics and the media. Similarly with the title of this piece; I went back and forth on whether to use the word deported. But it is the accurate word, as you’ll see later; there isn’t really a better way to describe being told that, unless you report to the border authorities, “you may be taken by force”. Things should be called as they are, and the “othering” – as the social scientists would call it – of migrants and associated words is part of the problem.
The key point of writing this: The emotional experience of migrating, visas, residency checks and so forth, is not one I’d really engaged with until I was forced to. This is also true for many other people I know. And different others have similar experiences that they never really talked about in the years I knew them, until I brought it up. So I’m writing this not to make people feel sorry for me, or claim I know what it’s like other migrants with many fewer advantages than me. My aim here is to describe what I experienced as an individual, what it felt like, and unpack my experience of the word that is often used in these contexts – “dehumanising” – as it may be a new insight for some.
So, background. I moved to Berlin from the UK in February 2022. My reason was simply a desire to try living abroad. I didn’t have a job in Germany when I moved (I was freelancing for various British organisations), but began looking soon after moving. I’m a British citizen, which means I get to stay in Schengen without a visa for 90 days in 180. For those who don’t know me - I’m white, have a PhD, financial savings, and a name (“Marsh”) which is very English-sounding but is also very often mistaken for a German name (and consequently misspelled “Marsch”). So basically I arrived with one disadvantage (no job) and lots of advantages.
(The “getting a job before moving” route can also be tricky though. You are applying with less of a network, and not only do you have to say “I’ll need a visa” to the potential employers; you’ll also need to find an official home address in Berlin, which potential employers would also know is a difficult task. And learning German properly, without living in Germany, would also be harder. For anyone wondering, ‘why not just do that’).
Feb 2022 – Feb 2023.
In 2022 I stayed in Germany with a mixture of carefully budgeting my visa-free allowance of days, plus a 6-month jobseekers visa – so a lot of travel between the UK and Germany. I remember having a 90-day supply of daily vitamins, and thinking “if these run out before I get a proper visa, I won’t be allowed in Germany anymore”. By the end of 2022 I hadn’t found a job, though a few possible (but uncertain) leads. Also, due to the combined craziness of Berlin rental market and my nomadic lifestyle, I had been through 8 addresses by this point. In my leaving-for-Germany-Christmas party, I couldn’t really tell my friends when I’d be back or how long I’d be around next year.
After some research over Christmas, I came back in February and applied for a language-learning visa. This means you commit to an intensive course (18+ hours per week) for a minimum of 3 months with no right to work – so it requires having the savings, or a job outside Germany which you can fit around the courses. There were a few reasons. The first was that I felt improving my language might improve my job prospects. I had applied for 10s of jobs by this point – many of which I had little real interest in, but I felt they could get me a visa.
Secondly, important detail here: if you apply for a visa, and send the required documents, you can stay in the country while they process it. If you leave you can’t re-enter, but you won’t be kicked out.
So after 1-2 months of processing, plus 3 months of German learning, I’d hopefully be in a much better position jobs-wise. In particular one organisation, that I knew pretty well, felt that by then they’d be in a strong position to offer me a job. The alternative was a freelance visa, but I’d heard these could be complicated and a bit unstable, and ultimately I wanted to escape freelancing. (I later discovered that I’d been misinformed, and that freelance visas can often be relatively straightforward and stable – though also might not be).
This probably all sounds very practical and strategic. It doesn’t capture the feeling of the time: of living in some highly uncertain board game, where you make moves thinking that the price of failure is being barred from a country that you want to call home; or the amount of time and mental effort spent researching the various options, comparing the possibilities, going through forums and asking friends to get the “real story”. I can pretty vividly remember the ceiling of the flat I lived in at the time, which I stared at a few nights while I struggled to sleep. I also remember the relief of receiving an impersonal automated email confirming that my visa was being processed, a few days before my time ran out.
So this I had a plan. Hopefully processing would be finished by April. Study German May-July, with UK freelancing on the side. Find German work. This meant I felt more able to take a stable flat which I could stay in as long as I liked, and I (finally) arranged for my stuff to be shipped from storage in the UK over to Germany. It was a waiting game, but it was starting to feel more stable.
Feb 2023 – June 2023
By May I still had not heard anything about my visa application. Nor did I have any idea when I would. Nor had I successfully found a job. So although I had no prospect of being kicked out of Germany, I also had no idea when I would be allowed to leave Germany (or technically, leave and be able to re-enter).
Work-wise I was taking various short-term freelance jobs in the UK, always caveated with “I won’t be able to do this long-term you know. How long? Erm, not sure”. Again, I’m lucky – I had the network and the reputation that allowed me to still find work despite all that. But I found it a deeply unsatisfying form of employment. And, of course, there was doing job applications on top of that.
I don’t normally feel homesick for the UK, but something about being disallowed from visiting the UK changed that. I also barely left Berlin. This felt a bit silly at the time – why not use the time to explore the country. But looking back I think that without structure, without the predictability of when would be a good or bad time to take a holiday, I just constantly deferred it. I had two UK weddings planned for August and September, and a family holiday in early October. Originally I assumed these would be fine; now I was having doubts.
In mid-May, I finally received an acknowledgement that my visa application was being taken up. The message at least opened with an apology that they were only just getting round to me. But then the questions started. I was asked things that I had specified in the form. There was a minor panic (for them and me) when they realised that I had been in and out of Germany for 18 months with no proper visa. I sent them my stamped passport to show the dates. Apparently that wasn’t enough, and they asked for copies of my plane and train tickets. Then various documents and confirmations. Important point – each one of these emails would have a delay of at least a week.
But now someone was at least talking to me. And they said that if I was planning to leave Germany while I was being processed, I could apply for a Grenzübertrittsbescheinigung – a “border crossing certificate”. So maybe I could go to the UK and to those weddings after all! I said yes please. This was ignored.
And so, the limbo continued into summer. By now I was even considering if I should apply for a graduate masters. Yes it costs money, yes it would limit my working hours a lot, yes I already had a masters and a PhD, yes I just wanted to have steady employment, to be producing useful things on a continuous basis for some organisation…. But at least that had a clear time point – if you got the Masters’ place, the university would basically guarantee a visa by the start of term. (Again, looking back at this time, all this thinking feels stupid. But at the time, it seemed smart to me. This is to give you a sense of where my head was at). I did not do this, but it was a close run thing.
At the time, in my conscious brain I was thinking all this was annoying but manageable. At least I didn’t have a time limit anymore! Maybe by the end of the year I’d be living a normal life! But I think friends could see it was a strain. They were increasingly wondering if they could assist somehow. Jokes about “maybe we could get married” started to have serious undertones.
People would also say “gosh, you really must want to live in Berlin”. And – kinda, yeah. But by this point it felt more like – I don’t want “them” to win. I’ve chosen to be in the country, I want to contribute to it, I want to contribute to it, I don’t want that to fail just because of stupid bureaucracy. I won’t blink first.
Sometimes people would also say “gosh, you must be really annoyed that the UK doesn’t have EU freedom of movement any more”. It was well meaning, but often quite uncomfortable for me – particularly when asked in the presence of people from countries who had never had it, and had no prospect of it, and didn’t have the various benefits a British passport still brings. It has brought me to the view that EU freedom of movement is an economically sensible option for Europe, but secures the advantages of being born European in a way which should give many liberals pause for thought. Unless they see it as an imperfect step to a similar but less Eurocentric system – very good book on that here.
So underlying my conscious resignation to wait was a draining negativity. One moment I still vividly remember was talking to my mum on the phone while walking along the streets. The reception was bad. This was, of course, frustrating. “Maybe it’s the tall buildings” I said. Then in words that I felt leapt out of my mouth rather than me saying them, I heard myself snap “or maybe this f***ing country just hates me”. “I don’t think it hates you”, my mum calmly replied. But I think I’d let my inner feelings speak for a moment.
(I should add that, bureaucracy aside, I have found the community in Berlin – both expats and native Germans – to be incredibly welcoming, and willing to move heaven and earth to help me, and I hope I can be that to others).
June-July 2023
It was around this time that AlgorithmWatch – an organisation I had enjoyed the work of before, but had not realised was based in Berlin – opened a job for someone to lead a project called “Auditing Algorithms for Systemic Risks”. The job spec matched my profile closely, and it required some but not fluent German. So I applied. But by this point I’d been rejected from so many jobs, and this sounded too good to be true, so I assumed nothing would come of it. I applied on 22 June. Within a week, I’d had an interview. To briefly test my German, I was asked to explain a challenge I’d faced at work. I described being in Downing Street under Boris Johnson. I think it went down well. Within another week, I’d had a second interview. On the 10th July I received an from the Director, Matthias Spielkamp, with the subject line “Good news!”. I think this is still probably the best subject line I have ever received.
And so I needed to change my application from a Language Learning Visa to a Blue Card – a sort of special employment visa for technical experts. One huge advantage – they are supposed to be processed quickly. Of course I had to then contact a new department, resubmit forms, and again answer ridiculous questions with long delays between emails. In particular, after I had sent a certificate proving I had a PhD:
Office: Please submit your module scores.Me: It’s a British PhD, it doesn’t have module scores.Office: No, from your undergraduate degree.
Cue contacting my old university to ask how I could do that. A 900-year-old institution managed to get me digital copies much more efficiently and smoothly than a professional immigration office.
At this point I had copied in Matthias, my soon-to-be boss (how “soon” was precisely the question). He replied to them in German, at length and in a restrained tone, noting that the job was very specific and I was very specifically qualified and they really needed to get the project going and please could they consider if all these questions were really necessary. He then replied to just me in English saying he found the questions “absurd - and flatly degrading”. Again, I hadn’t consciously thought of it that way. But it did sum up how it felt – as well as dehumanising, uncaring, and just an unnecessary disruption to my life.
But at least it was underway. I was going to be fine.
August 2023 – or, the day I thought I was getting deported.
Remember the Grenzübertrittsbescheinigung I had asked for, in order to attend those weddings? (Or even just to see the UK again). I had now asked 4 times by email, and been ignored every time. It was time to deploy the secret weapon on German bureaucracy. It was time to send a fax.
Germany is a very paper-based country. This is particularly so for official documentation, where physical copies are often required. (Extra story: I had been refused access to a flat I should have been renting because they couldn’t kick out the tenant, because he had been served his notice by email not by letter).
The flip side of this: When you send a letter or fax, it’s treated with higher priority than an email. It’s limited, in that it largely just opens up an email conversation (which is then slow), but if you just have one thing you need it’s a good way to get an answer quicker. It’s a trick people in Germany who are fighting bureaucracy learn quickly (and increasingly doesn’t work – the immigration office turned off its fax machines shortly after I got my visa).
I had used the trick before, for instance in opening up my Blue Card application (the people at the counter of the fax shop were baffled that I didn’t understand the process). So I tried it again, for my fifth time asking for a Grenzübertrittsbescheinigung. I weirdly had a bad gut feeling as I walked to the fax shop, like I was about to open some bad bureaucracy box. I had also heard of something else, called a Fiktionsbescheinigung (a “fictional certificate”) – but as far as I could tell, that gave you a right to remain (so was maybe the automated email I already had?), not to cross borders. That would obviously be a “border crossing certificate”, right? And I had explained my situation in the fax; I wanted to leave Germany temporarily, I was waiting for a visa but needed a way to get back in. If I couldn’t get back in, I could lose my job and thereby the visa application. Everything was very official. There was no real risk.
This was a Friday. On Monday morning I received an email (in German).
“Dear Herr Dr. Marsh, here is your requested document”. I opened it. It read (again in German)
“Herr Dr. Oliver Marsh is permitted to remain in the Republic of Deutschland until 20th August” (It was the 8th at this point).
“You must then present yourself to the border authorities... If you do not comply with this order without sufficient reason, you may be taken by force”.
The fairly obvious point – why would I ask for such a document? – didn’t seem to have occurred to the sender.
There was nothing in the document about returning, so my point about losing my job if I couldn’t get back in seemed to have been ignored as well.
Maybe I was misunderstanding the highly legalistic German. I found a good friend, a lawyer from the Supreme Court of Liechtenstein, and showed him. He read it and started quietly swearing. He turned to another friend of ours, another lawyer who supports Syrian immigrants. “Oh that’s bad” the guy said. It turned out it was a Fiktionsbescheinigung that I should have asked for. Again, one can question why professional immigration officers hadn’t picked that up from the explanation of my situation.
Over the next few days I did very little other than panic and send emails. The immigration office was good enough to only leave delays of about a day, rather than a week, between answers. But the answers generally seemed surprised that I was so scared. The point of the Grenzübertrittsbescheinigung, they explained, was to protect me. Because of my waiting-for-a-visa situation, it would look to border authorities like I had stayed illegally. This told them that I had been allowed to remain until 20 August. “But how do I get back in?” I asked. “Just show your passport” I was told. I wondered if they had heard about Brexit.
I sent an email to a different department asking for an emergency Fiktionsbescheinigung (I never heard back). I also emailed the British Embassy; they told me this wasn’t in their remit. A friend gave me the address of an immigration lawyer, who said “this is too short notice, but good luck!”. Moving all my stuff over to Germany began to feel like a very stupid move.
On day 3 of this I scheduled an email to send at 6am, when I heard the officials begin their day, with the subject line (in German) “Please please answer”. I said, in two lines – “does this document allow me to leave, or require me to leave? And if I leave, how do I get back in”. The answer came within hours: The document allowed me to leave, it didn’t require it. To get back in, I would show my passport. “Thank you, I don’t believe the second part” I thought. I stayed in Germany and missed the first of the two weddings. But I wasn’t being deported.
That weekend I went to a woodland retreat with some friends. The timing was perfect. But, as anyone will tell you, I’m a social animal – and that weekend I found myself finding spots to be alone, and just process, much more than I normally would. But I felt over it all enough to tell the story by day 3.
“Oh yes, that happened to me too!” said my Argentinian friend.
On 21 August I got an email confirming that my Blue Card had been approved. I just needed to have an appointment to confirm the details. Then they would send the details to the Federal Printer (yes that’s a thing) for the card to be printed. I could get an appointment within 10 days. I still had 4 weeks until the next wedding, 8 until the family holiday, and 10 until a (newly arranged) work trip to San Francisco. This all felt fine.
The appointment went fine. It was good to meet the bureaucrats face to face – they were actually friendly to me! (I imagine this is not always the case). Then at the end: “OK, we’ll send the details for your card to be printed. It’ll take 6-8 weeks.”
September 2023 onwards
I obviously missed the second wedding. The card still hadn’t arrived as my parents were travelling to France for day 1 of the 3-day family holiday. (Yes France is in Schengen so theoretically I could travel there with no visa. But by this point I was too scared). I left a note on my letterbox saying “if you post something, please ring my doorbell on the way out. The day passed with no post.
I went down on day 2. No post. I went upstairs to call my parents, to tell them we should assume I wouldn’t join. As I did so, the doorbell rang (this is all real, I am not exaggerating for effect). The card had arrived. I booked the first flight I could find – there was a delay and I almost missed the connecting flight, but I made it. I was so tired. Nonetheless after dinner I opened up my laptop and applied for my ESTA for San Francisco, finally knowing I could do the journey but afraid I’d left too late. It took about 5 minutes; it was confirmed the next day.
Since then I’ve come to appreciate living a normal life in Germany, knowing I’m allowed to be here, and to leave, and to come back. Ironically, I’ve explored more of Germany since then. I have rediscovered energy and focus I thought I had lost back in 2023. Next year I can apply for residency; potentially citizenship if I reach C1 level German (this would be hard but I don’t think unattainable…). And I’ve tried to make sure, if I know someone is planning to move here, that I force lots of advice on them. The immigration office has faced numerous requests-for-information and media stories, which have revealed total chaos and an overly bureaucratic culture. I haven’t heard much about them learning from their issues.
I’m aware the arc of this story has gone through tension, to farce, to resolution. But I want to focus back on the most boring part, the first half of 2023. That’s the really important bit – not the missed weddings, or even the almost-deportation. It’s the 8 months of my life where I was operating as a shadow version of myself, unable to work or focus or plan as I wanted to, unsure when it would all end. I was keeping a spreadsheet to track my activities at the time - every week I would open it, disappointed in how little I'd been able to accomplish, or focus on. It was a time of feeling like I had chosen to live somewhere, and am enduring a lot, for a place that gives every indication that I’m a problem to be addressed – an item in a long to-do list, a potential fraud who needs to be scrutinised, an idiot who somehow doesn’t understand the difference between Bescheinigungs – not a person to be helped. It's a feeling that I still haven't entirely lost.
To return to my point up top: This experience is not a particularly bad one by the standards of immigration. On the cycle to the weekend retreat, my aforementioned friend who works with Syrian immigrants, told me his work could reduce the waiting time for Syrian doctors from 3 years to 1 year. They can’t work in the meantime, and have to lock away savings to make sure they can afford things like health insurance. I have remarked multiple times on all the advantages I have – my ethnicity, my qualifications, my savings. And, ultimately, if it all went wrong I would end up back in the UK. It would have been pretty emotionally devastating – but ultimately I’d have been safe and have a comfortable life to return to. For me the Grenzübertrittsbeschienigung was deeply upsetting – but it didn’t also threaten me with poverty, prison, or death.
But even for me, with these advantages, it was really hard. Emotionally as well as practically. I maintain my generally left-wing-ish pro-state pro-government stance. But it made me realise the really cruel side that this can entail (I just happen to think that marketizing much of society can also often lead to cruel outcomes, with even less accountability or accessibility).
I experienced this cruel side as a side-effect of a terrible system. For many, it’s a deliberate part of the system, the creation of “hostile environments”, hostilty to accomplish political goals. And that’s growing - in political rhetoric, in the media, and in public sentiment across many countries.
I think politicians should shout more about the benefits of immigration, while also openly discussing potential negative sides of it – whether economic or cultural, real or just perceived, closing down discussions about them clearly doesn’t help. But opening up the conversation should also mean shouting about the benefits of migration. And sure, some might still argue there need to be restrictions for whatever reason. I don’t want to dismiss that as evil; but I want it to be accompanied by thinking of the real people affected. This all becomes more urgent with the impacts of wars, climate change, and the like – much of which has been worsened by countries now trying to keep the primary victims in the danger zones. At its heart, this system preserves the luck or unluck that come from accidents of birth; overcoming that is, to me, why we should have societies and politics.
These are big political sentiments and ideas, which we hear and read about every day. But more and more I just see the cruelty, the dismissal of “migrants”, not thinking about the people. All respect to anyone who is going through it.
Thanks for reading.
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