Do immigrants have to learn German in Germany?

Dulaj Madhushan hates dog food the most. Lifting dozens of 15-kilo packs from the trucks to the conveyor belt in the Amazon sorting center in Berlin is the most unpleasant part of his nine-hour shifts.

All the more annoying for the 29-year-old Sri Lankan is that he has other ambitions for his life in Germany. He has a bus driver's license from his home country, and has grown tired of seeing articles in the local papers about how the BVG, the German capital's public transport operator, is so short of personnel that it is struggling to fill its timetables.

Three months after he finally got his 10-year residency permit (thanks to his partner being an EU citizen), Madhushan is still no closer to driving a bus.

Madhushan's first few months in Germany, he said, have been very stressful. "I thought it was going to be easy — it's not," he told DW. "I need to do the vocational training and the language at the same time, and I can't find where I can get this." His efforts have so far been frustrating — the man at the BVG office he visited spoke little English and simply told him to check the BVG recruitment website for information (which is only in German).

Madhushan eventually learned that he needed intermediate-level German to work as a bus driver, but he found no information on the BVG's website on whether the BVG offered such courses, or on how he might go about getting his Sri Lankan driver's license recognized in Germany. In a statement to DW, the BVG said that recruiting foreign workers was "on the agenda" and that German courses were available for those who already had qualifications.

"Further concepts are currently being developed," said a BVG spokesperson. "Together with our partners, we are recruiting foreign skilled workers who already live in Berlin and, together with our partner, we are training them for the job of bus driver."

Madhushan's trip to the job center was also difficult. Even though the official he dealt with there could speak fluent English, she told him he had to bring a German speaker with him to translate. Faced with these frustrations, he took the easiest and quickest path to paid work: the Amazon sorting center — via a leading European recruitment agency — which requires neither German language skills nor any qualifications.

No German at work

There are virtually no Germans in the massive warehouse, said Madhushan, and even those there mainly speak English — as that is the one language everyone more or less understands.

"Even my supervisors are Afghan or Syrian or Pakistani, so they speak English in meetings," he said. All the other workers, mostly from India or Africa, speak whichever language they share. Would learning German do him any good at work? "No, not there," said Madhushan.

That is a fairly typical experience, said Britta Schneider, professor of language use and migration at the Viadrina European University in Frankfurt (Oder). "There's a big gap between the monolingual public discourse in Germany — you have to learn German, and if you don't, it means you don't want to integrate — and the practice, where it's often the case that you don't need any German at all," she told DW.

The result, said Schneider, is that many immigrants have little incentive to learn German — especially as the official German courses offered at adult education centers are so time-consuming that it's difficult to hold down a job at the same time. On offer in Berlin, for example, is a course comprising six modules of 100 hours each, taught in four-hour blocks up to five days a week. That would rule Madhushan out, unless he quits his job.

The lack of support in the German job market has not gone unnoticed among immigrants: An OECD survey released in January asked skilled workers either already in Germany or those interested in coming in what areas they would like to see more support. The top two answers were finding a job and learning German.

The same survey found a big difference between expectations and reality among foreign workers. When asked whether it was important to learn German to find an appropriate job in the country, 52% said yes before they came, but 65% thought so once they'd arrived.

There also seems to be an impression among foreign workers that they are less welcome than they thought they would be. When asked whether Germany had a "real interest in winning foreign workers," 55% said yes while they were still abroad, but only 33% agreed once they were living in Germany.

Multilingual society

The insistence on integration into society — supported by political discourse in Germany (and Europe generally) where nationalism is increasingly driving political debate — is at odds with what Schneider called a "social reality that is multilingual, where German doesn't always play an important role."

She also questioned the assumption that states should be monolingual and that sharing a single language is essential for social cohesion. "It's not really justifiable, given that we have a shortage of skilled labor," she said.

There is evidence that Germany is struggling to compete with other nations when it comes to attracting foreign workers. The international expat network InterNations conducted a survey of the most attractive countries for foreign workers, and found that Germany came 50th of 53 nations. While the job market offered many opportunities, the survey found that expats struggle to settle in. "Expats have a very hard time making friends, finding housing, and dealing with Germany's lack of a digital infrastructure," the survey concluded.

The OECD's 2023 "Talent Attractiveness" index was a little kinder, ranking Germany at 15th out of 38 — but still behind rivals such as the US, the UK and Canada.

Still, English appears to be becoming a more important language in the German job market — especially in big cities like Berlin. The German Startup Association found this year that the proportion of startups in the capital where the working language is English had risen from 42.3% to 55.8%.

But that is, of course, not true everywhere in Germany or in sectors where the country needs more workers, as Bernd Meyer, professor for intercultural communication at the University of Mainz, pointed out. "In care work, or in hospitals, it's not possible without German skills: care workers need to be able to talk to each other, to patients, to doctors," he told DW.

But he also said German society needs to become more multilingual. "The authorities, the doctors, the social institutions need to be able to speak several languages because the population is becoming more multilingual," he said.

There has been some progress in this direction: Germany's employment agencies are now specifically employing more people who can speak other languages — especially Turkish and Russian.

Schneider also thinks companies could be more proactive, for example by offering short German courses tailored to the jobs they need filled. This would save immigrants several hundred hours of general language courses before they can even look for work.

As for Madhushan, learning German is essentially imperative if he wants to be a bus driver, though it looks like he will have to finance that himself — probably on his earnings from Amazon.

Edited by: Rina Goldenberg

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