It’s good that they try new ways to attract people. Very few people want to live in these areas.
An example to illustrate how dire this situation is: I was contacted multiple times by small East German universities that literally told me, I could immediately start a professorships there. Apparently the selection process is at the moment almost a formality, since they just don’t have any applicants for the positions..
Did you have a PhD or prior experience as a professor? Or was this just like "you're a smart and knowledgeable person, so you're welcome to come be a professor at our institution"?
The second is culturally hard for me to imagine in Germany, but if so, that could show even more strongly how extreme the situation is!
No, the second would be both absurd and illegal, not the parent but we're talking about lack of competition here, not the end of civilization.
It most certainly means that "under a normal run of things it's a huge competition from qualified PhDs to become a full tenured professor so it means years on poorly paid intermediate positions, here there are <1.0 candidates per position so you are automatically approved".
Depopulated sounds like nobody is living there, something like Pripyat. This town is said to have lost over 50% of its former 53,000 so still over 25,000 left. And apartments in GDR were rather small.
Not a native speaker, but is depopulated really the right word here or just clickbait? At least I was expecting something else. Heavily shrunk of course.
Does decaffeinated coffee have zero caffeine? Do deboned fish have zero bones? Does debugged software have zero bugs?
Not zero, but an only insignificant residual because zero is hard to achieve in real life. Also Pripyat has some illegal inhabitants.
(I don't think debugged software is a commonly used term, so no need to discuss the meaning)
Edit: Genuine question: Would native speakers call Detroit depopulated? The shrinkage seems to be about the same ratio.
Does desaturated mean a color with zero saturation?
Does detroit contain zero troits?
If decaffeinated coffee had half the caffeine of regular coffee it would most certainly not be called that. Same with deboned fish.
The expectation using those terms is that only a negligible amount remains if any at all.
I guess the difference between "unpopulated" and "depopulated" is the former means no one at all, while the latter just means the population had a (meaningfully significant) decrease.
> Not a native speaker, but is depopulated really the right word here
Straight from the dictionary:
depopulate (v): to substantially reduce the population of (an area)
You're thinking of "unpopulated." "Depopulated" means the population has DEcreased.
Unpopulated is static, no change implied.
Depopulated implies change, people used to live there. For me it meant no significant number left.
Does 25000 people leaving a city not count as depopulation then?
No, people wouldn’t call Detroit depopulated
> is depopulated really the right word here or just clickbait?
I would consider depopulated to be correct
I live in the Netherlands and got lucky with my housing situation, but given the prices here and the fact that I work mostly remove, I would have seriously considered moving to East Germany. I saw apartments for sale for 25k there. What I read everywhere is that there aren't many jobs available locally and the area is relatively sparsely populated, never really recovering from the damage done during the war and the years under Soviet rule.
Here is the jobs board for those interested...
https://www.fachkraefteportal-brandenburg.de/eisenhuettensta...
Turns out they didn't need all that lebensraum after all?
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44339123
> The strength of the anti-migrant,
If you live in a town with a shrinking population with a labour shortage, it doesn't really seem to make sense to be anti migrants...
Depends a lot on how law-abiding and civic minded the specific immigrants are.
In these regions of Germany it has very little to do with that, as there's hardly any immigrants in Eastern Germany, except Berlin of course. It's about prejudice and xenophobia due to the unknown.
As a law-abiding civic-minded migrant I also feel unwelcome.
It really doesn't though. If a society enforces laws (and civic-minded laws are possible, such as fines for littering etc), it shouldn't matter at all. Every group of people has criminals, hard workers, productive members of society, etc.
Exactly.
Enforcing the law costs money and these cities have been saving on that for decades now.
So: exactly.
Being anti immigrant isn’t about being sensible, it’s about having a bogeyman to blame for all problems people face. It’s much easier to say “brown people took your life away” than to face reality many small and large decisions made by the government and the people have led to the current outcome.
For instance:
> A palpable sense of decline has spurred support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, which won nearly 40% of local votes in the February general election.
People that don’t look “right” should seriously consider if this is the right place to live given the circumstances, which is going to make those with many options to never consider a place like this. What will be left? Not much, the rust belt in the US is a good example of towns dying because the population can’t accept outsiders. A friend, that’s a neurologist, moved to a small town in the Midwest, him and another dude were the two only neurologists in many and many miles, the supermarket cashier asked for his ID and if he was in the country legally and isn’t even brown, just cos of his accent.
Couple of months later he moved to a large city that had no shortage of neurologists and will never come back to the countryside. These people will destroy whatever is left before they accept others, so that’s what what will be.
> It’s much easier to say “brown people took your life away” than to face reality many small and large decisions made by the government and the people have led to the current outcome.
Tangential note: While I agree, there is something missing. You basically shift the blame from one group of people to another. This might be right to a certain extent, but doesn't take into account the enormous influence of things people don't have any control over (at least not people in Germany, even collectively). In other words, it's possible (although impossible to prove as economy is not a provable science), that no matter what individual people and the government would do, Germany would be still in the current situation, or not much different, especially in the long run (short term you can print some money but will have to face consequences anyway).
> People that don’t look “right” should seriously consider if this is the right place
Doesn't really matter. Look at birthrates. People that don't exist won't immigrate to Germany. Germany will be begging for immigrants in a few years ... and won't get them. Or, at least, not from North Africa, and I don't really see any other place to get them.
The US will keep having immigrants from South and Middle America for a bit longer but even that is going to slow down dramatically.
> towns dying because the population can’t accept outsiders
There also are no jobs there. The population of these towns wants lots of things done ... but won't pay for doing them. If they did, there would be no shortage of US people/Germans doing them.
To be completely honest there is no longer much reason for these cities to exist. And if you're an old person enjoying your pension there, that really sucks. If you're young, you move away. Just like the rust belt.
> Or, at least, not from North Africa, and I don't really see any other place to get them.
I have many excellent and hard-working colleagues from India, for example. North Africa is not the only option, and just taking these people out of Africa and instantly placing in a completely different context will only create trouble. These things really need to be done properly but I guess we're past that point thanks to Merkel & co.
There are several very different types of anti-immigrant sentiment in the US. They differ by region and they also differ from the feelings in Europe.
1. Basic, racist, "this person is a different skin color".
2. "We're not racist, but they're willing to work cheaper and take our jobs".
3. "They want to keep their own culture and not integrate with ours."
The third one is far less prevalent in the US than it is in Europe. I think this is for several reasons, but chief among them is that immigrants to the US do actually want to integrate into their new society, whereas immigrants to Europe generally do not. Unlike Europe, the US offers the possibility for immigrants to become as "American" as anyone else, regardless of their race or religion. Whereas immigrants to France, for example, can never become "French". This is mutually reinforcing - the French won't let them become "French", and the immigrants naturally react by not wanting to. Even if they do support liberal French cultural values without excessive judgment, which many do not, that is rarely their main reason to move there except in some political cases. The aim of immigrants to the US is not just economic prosperity, but to join the society and to be American (speaking for my own mixed Latin, Arabic and Jewish immigrant family).
This leaves a situation in the US where only (1) and (2) are arguments that have any traction, and those only have traction with a backwards and racist part of the population, aka MAGA. (3) is a much more difficult question, and it would have more traction here if it were true that immigrants to the US were similar to immigrants to Europe, in only seeking economic gains and choosing to remain separate from the societal mainstream.
You seem to be conflating (3) with the previous two. And maybe for some right-wing European nationalists it is. But I'm not a European white man, and myself and my Filipina partner have heard from some of those right-wing Europeans that as long as we want to learn their culture, they have no problem with us.
When JD Vance goes to Europe and scorns their immigration policy, he is using #3 to their faces, but he is appealing to racist voters who claim #1 and #2 at home. Conversely, when a European tells Americans that all anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe falls into the 1 and 2 categories, you are not honestly telling them about #3.
It's the same in Saudi Arabia, isn't it? You can't go get a job in an oil field and go around waving a bible and drinking bourbon. The fact that the West tolerates a lot of different beliefs and ways of life is a good thing, it adds to our diversity and that is our strength. But that tolerance for others has to also be a foundational understanding for newer arrivals who come here. And if it's not, and if they enter into open hostilities with the country that received them, then I don't think all of that can be laid at the feet of ignorant skin-color-based racism.
As for 3, regardless if it's true or not as it's also quite subjective, you need to also ask yourself the question whether that's really desired, or, whether the society has the moral right to ask that. Think about Jews during the ages - they survived, their culture survived in exile thanks to that.
In an ideal world, the majority would just appreciate the variety, in the actual world the minority will always suffer by just being different, though. (Grave incompatibilities aside, such as underage marriages and other ways of harming people.)
> Whereas immigrants to France, for example, can never become "French"
That's untrue. It really depends on where they arrived and their support system. If their support system isn't French, of course integration is extremely hard. I know a lot of people hosting political refugees (my mom and her friends basically), and met a lot of immigrants. I'd say the only couple that didn't integrate was hosted and worked through a Kazak support group before being contacted by cimade and moved far from Paris (tehy were white and christian, so racism and islamophobia are out). Other refugees i've met through the association integrated just fine. I must add that refugees who already have a support system in a big sity often refuse Cimade's help, so the refugees/immigrants i met had a specific profile (either single moms with child or highly educated middle-aged, most from a minority group in a violent country. Kurds and Druze, Kazaks, some russians, one Iraki from before the Irak war, some non-french speaking Africans).
I guarantee you most of them became French. I agree it's the minority, but it's the minority targeted by new laws and the far right (refugees, who can't have their papers in order until Cimade take care of that and teach them french).
I would agree we should do more for cultural integration for the rest of the immigrated crowd, through sport, through games, popular education in general (if you're an immigrant and your child go in youth camps with the Francas every summer, your child will end up French enough. Maybe a bit communist though, be carefull) and maybe through school, but we've dropped the ball in the 2000s, and killing the proximity police (which, while it didn't work as much as expected in big cities, worked extremely well in mid-size ones) didn't help. I understand the general sentiment, but i feel like current policies target the wrong crowd, and are ineffective in solving the actual issues.
What if you live in a town with a shrinking population with a jobs shortage?
These right wing sentiments have never been about facts and logic
"I don't want my town/area to change demographically beyond my recognition" is a completely self-consistent position, it's just axiomatically taken as wrongthink by people who seem to think everything can be broken down into a logical deduction from high modernist axioms (so-called facts and logic are opinionated, everything requires a numeraire)
> "I don't want my town/area to change demographically beyond my recognition"
If that is the position people hold, I think it would be good to understand why they feel that way.
To me, holding that position just feels racist or xenophobic, but I'm hoping that there's a lot more nuance to it than that. But I just don't know, and don't know anyone who holds that view such that I can ask them.
Do you really not understand why people wouldn't want to live in a foreign country as they get older without ever having moved or been given the option? Would you want to learn another language at, say, age sixty not because you wanted to, but because you're having trouble conducting business anymore in the language you've always used? What if you didn't like the new food, and there very few restaurants left that serve the food you like?
Is it really that hard to understand?
Many are racist but the deeper reason to be skeptical is that the current/dominant model assumes everyone in the world is basically fungible and can seamlessly integrate into the west without any particular guidance.
That might have even been true decades ago when rates of influx were tiny, but now we live with a firehose under the assumption that there cannot be any hysteresis — we are a big planet, any new culture is a point mass. And that all these new populations get along (they don't).
We invaded Afghanistan and started nation building on the assumption that within every Afghan is a Western liberal trying to get out. If you haven't seen it, please watch the Adam Curtis doc "Bitter lake" to see how much of a disaster this project was. We don't understand their culture at all.
Those same people who planned that war brought about the current normal of historically flows of people every year. Some of them have explicitly said they wanted to do a cultural transformation project too but I'm prepared to say that was a relatively small group of extremists.
Most of the world is very, very, different to the things westerners are used to. We don't have clans, we don't marry inside our families, we don't grow up wanting to make our parents proud anywhere near as much as in non-western countries (etc, "WEIRD" culture as argued in the now-famous book).
Not all non-western countries are the same e.g. SEA famously quite compatible with our culture up to a point, but you'd clearly give a daughter very different travel advice if she was going to Morocco versus Inverness.
If nothing else, is it not a bit weird to go to quite a few large European cities and find roughly the same distribution of people serving your coffee or waiting at your table?
I genuinely wonder what the many Chinese tourists coming to London think when they go into a shop to buy some water or something and all the staff are new arrivals to Britain speaking (say) Hindi rather than English to eachother.
And that's not to say they couldn't integrate at some point but at the moment the "purpose of a system is what it does" revealed preference is that we don't want them to.
Wild to think that the country that built the largest empire in the world would have people speaking multiple languages in its most important city.
Also, this conservative thing of being bothered by people speaking a language they don’t understand amongst themselves shows the eternal entitlement they feel. Everyone’s actions must cater to me, I must understand and be able to participate in everything I want without having to do anything extra.
It’s like people visiting the countryside in Brazil and expecting to find English speaking restaurant servers everywhere.
I'm not in Brazil I'm in the capital city of the United Kingdom.
The staff in my local tesco and sainsburys do not primarily speak English to eachother, and have previously struggled to understand basic questions I've had.
Please tell me in what way I'm entitled by wondering if this is a good way to organise a society? No one wanted it.
The purpose of a nation should be to do great things. How can we do anything with huge cultural questions floating around unanswered?
"What does it mean to be British?" is now a thing, and is in turn completely unanswerable. What are British values? Being nice to people?
This is really only a recent western dalliance too, most of the world's largest cities are actually extremely homogenous because they're in Asia.
When did your country started killing regionalism and local dialects? then mid 19th century? Because before that, i guarantee you Common english was not the primary language in London. Nationalism is very recent, and mostly pushed for militaristic reasons. Having multiple languages present in your seat of power used to be a source of pride and a proof of power for kings and emperors, so the change has to be recent.
> This is really only a recent western dalliance too
Historically, it's the opposite, homogenous populations are a very recent thing.
>> speaking (say) Hindi rather than English to eachother.
What's the problem? They're not speaking to you and they share another language that's not English. Integration doesn't mean don't speak your mother tongue ever again. You're also taking about Europe where a different language is spoken every 100km.
Personally I find it pretty cool to hear other languages around me. Great opportunities to learn
The Europeans I know who would be considered right wing, are completely concerned about culture and care not about race. That said, culture and race are highly correlated. Want to come in and assimilate? No problem. Want to come and bring your misogynistic, homophobic, violent culture? No thank you.
>> Want to come and bring your misogynistic, homophobic, violent culture?
So basically right wing Americans?
I have no idea, I'm in neither Europe nor the Americas.
How a person feels is also a fact. I wonder if you are being selective in facts, as I'm not sure it's a politic (ie left/right matter). We could also look at facts on crime, tax contributions/burdens, etc and see a different yet factual perspective. I think the way forward is not increasing factuality (if that's even a word) but increasing people being heard and then reconciling those different perspectives. Looking for facts to entrench ones own opinions thus seems a step backwards to me.
Correction: spelling
Being pro-immigration used to be a right-wing sentiment, because it was a good way to get labor costs down. And it used to be the left-wing labor parties that were against immigration for that very reason.
True left-wing politicians like Bernie Sanders are still against immigration because it lowers the wages of working class people.
Politics is a messy business.Angela Merkel’s 2015 open-door policy faced harsh criticism, but the refugees it welcomed have proven their value. Two-thirds of Syrian refugees are now employed, many reducing public reliance and boosting the economy. Beyond jobs, some have become entrepreneurs—founding startups that create new employment and bring innovation. One Syrian-founded tech company alone employs 15 people. With over 83,000 granted citizenship last year, these contributions anchor refugees as vital to Germany’s future, turning initial fears into success stories. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-15/syrian-im...
>> Two-thirds of Syrian refugees are now employed, many reducing public reliance and boosting the economy.
I don't think legitimate Syrian refugees were the biggest problem. Rather, the open-door policy was abused by lots of young men from other MENA-countries, with no eligibility for asylum. Deporting them proved pretty hard, and crime stats prove that some of them had a very bad attitude towards their new host.
> Two-thirds of Syrian refugees are now employed
Sanders has shifted from his old view quite a bit, and is pro immigration specifically for filling low wage jobs, and holding wages down.
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/07/bernie-sanders-2020...
This is one of those cases where the left–right spectrum just doesn’t capture the interplay of various economic, social, and cultural positions.
> If you live in a town with a shrinking population with a labour shortage, it doesn't really seem to make sense to be anti migrants...
Do you prefer a slow death of your culture, or a catastrophic end to it?
Almost as if in America, people vote rationally! One town where 66% of population is on medicaid and life expectancy is 10 years under the national average, just voted 88% for Trump. Sure enough, in Germany the highest anti-migrant vote is in areas where there are no migrants at all.
Well some people don’t feel like all humans are perfectly identical interchangeable units. If you magically swapped the population of Ireland with the population Japan, do you think that the Japanese would suddenly behave like Irish people just because they were now living in Ireland?
Culture and identity are tied to nations, and just dropping millions of people from Africa into Europe doesn’t make them European.
If your answer is that they just assimilate, they often do not. Example: many churches are being replaced with mosques in London. That is not assimilation, that is simply replacing one population with another.
It is okay for a people who have existed for thousands of years to want their own country and culture to survive in its same state, even if the population shrinks for a while. These labor shortages and shrinking populations are not eternal, eventually the population will bounce back.
do you have any sources for the church for mosque replacement theory?
There is no officially published number by the government, but 3 signs you can look at:
1. anecdotal evidence, I have been to several in the UK myself. You can find converted mosques by using Google Maps as well.
2. You can find videos from UK Muslims celebrating their cultural victories talking about the churches they have converted. Here are two such examples:
> 500 CHURCHES TURNED INTO MOSQUES IN A CITY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62h_Im5cqxY
>How 100's of Churches are transforming into Mosques!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYBV4y42kXY
3. You can find videos from UK Christians lamenting the conversion of their churches.
One such example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YGA54WadgY
You can also just go and look up the number of mosques in the UK increasing over time: https://www.muslimsinbritain.org/statistics/statistics01.php
The most popular baby name in the UK has been Mohamed for the last two years. That's also a pretty good sign.
This place looks so cute.
And at the same time, Berlin is struggling with skyrocketing housing costs.
I wonder why people can't put two and two together and keep digging themselves deeper and deeper into a hole.
People of Berlin made a particularly stupid decision when they voted against any construction on the vast empty area known as the Tempelhofer Feld. They could have had anything they wanted, like car free residential area with lots of green, but they decided that no new housing is what they want.
To be fair, they use it quite a lot for exercise and recreation, so it's not like a completely disused open space. Other very expensive cities also have relatively huge parks (like Central Park in New York or Golden Gate Park here in San Francisco). I've heard people try to estimate the real estate value of Central Park, which may be somewhere around $1,000,000,000,000.
The size of Tempelhofer Feld is apparently almost exactly the same as that of Central Park, although it's probably much less used compared to Central Park. It looks like Central Park might get somewhere around four times as many visits.
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