content: I agree with you that a minimum requirement to work in another country should be learning the language. Not doing so is like going into someone else's house and demanding they do things your way. Just some observations as someone living in Berlin, not trying to prove some kind of a point:   The sad thing is that here in Berlin, it's very common for people to not bother learning the language. There are shops that even sell bags that say "Life is too short to learn German". The thing is, Berlin is such an international island in Germany that you can get away with not knowing German. I know plenty of people who moved here and haven't bothered to pick up the language. My office environment language is English. Can you image what that'd be like in the US? What if a foreign company came to a US city and setup an office where the primary working language of that office was not English? It kinda sounds absurd, but it's normal here. Over the past few years I've been going through the process of legally obtaining a right to live and work in Germany and am on the road to citizenship. I've been using an immigration lawyer to help me navigate this. She visits the immigration office in Berlin almost every day for work and knows the people there. She's told me they've had a problem with people trying to pretend they're Syrian when they're just economic migrants. As a test, they often bring in a real Syrian to ask them where in Syria they're from. (To see if they name a town, can describe what it's like, and have a dialect from that region)  As an outsider, I think the German attitude is really quite sad. I get the sense that a lot of the refugee policy is fueled by a kind of shame and self-loathing. I mean, you get it drilled into you over and over again from birth that your grandparents were the worst generation in the world and that your country did the most unspeakably horrible things. You develop this feeling that you don't deserve to exist as a country, or it's not right to be proud of how far the place has come since then. You're always trying to go out of your way to be helpful, sometimes to the point of determent for your society, all in some kind of overcompensation for something the current generations had nothing to do with! That's why I hate it when people always immediately scream Nazi at the drop of a hat when they're inconvenienced.  (Germany is a perfect environment for this kind of "shame it forward"; the whole SJW bullshit of "individuals don't exist, and you carry the collective shame and guilt of every crime ever committed by anyone with an affiliation with the same group as you") Sorry if that was a bit much. Just some thoughts.  Guten Nacht. :)