I was born in Melbourne, Australia in January 1990, and moved to Germany in January 2024 to live and work. This is an account of my experiences as an international migrant, which may be useful to people who want to follow a similar path, or just an interesting on-the-ground report for people curious about migration in general.

For context, it's important to note that I had certain advantages as a migrant to Germany that made things straightforward:

• Citizenship of a well-respected country (Australia)
• Many years of professional experience in a relatively high-demand field (software)
• A close contact in the country who could help me navigate systems (my boyfriend)
• European ancestry (it is hard to visually distinguish me from a native German)

People without similar advantages would likely encounter challenges that I did not and haven't covered here. On the other hand, if you are already a citizen of an EU country you would find many things easier.

It's also worth noting that I am not particularly wealthy for an Australian, as I spent much of my 20s doing non-profit or academic stuff. So some of the decisions I'll talk about were driven by frugality. Of course, anyone who can afford intercontinental air travel is pretty rich by global standards!

Why move to Germany?

This is often a question that Germans ask when meeting me, in their kind of cutely self-deprecating way. Many Germans do not have a strong sense of national pride, while Australia has a decent reputation as a place to live (wildlife notwithstanding), so it's not an obvious upgrade to them.

And indeed, my main reason for moving to Germany in particular was just because my boyfriend is German and I wanted more cuddles in my life!

I did have other reasons for moving to Europe, though:

• I love the kind of humanist idealism that the EU represents as a peaceful, supranational social-democratic collaboration between very diverse nations and cultures, and wanted to lend my support (small though it may be) to that cause.
• Most of my friendships were online, and most of those were European; demography means I'm more likely to encounter Europeans on the internet than other Australians.

I also had some reasons for leaving Australia:

• Melbourne is an excellent city, but it is also extremely popular and so the cost of living is high. The average rent here in Dresden is more reasonable.
• My family and childhood were a bit too interesting and I wanted a fresh start on my own terms away from all of that.

In the past, I nearly moved to the UK, which is also a beautiful place with lots of interesting people, and comically polite in a way that I enjoy. However, the departure of the UK from the European Union led to me losing interest in that goal. So Germany it is!

Convincing a country to let you live there

Governments offer various interesting pathways for foreign nationals to gain residency and work permissions, depending on your situation. For example, the Volga Germans are descendants of people invited to Russia by Catherine the Great in the 1700s, and receive special permission to repatriate to Germany under the Spätaussiedler program. My boyfriend's dad followed this path, moving here from post-Soviet Tajikistan, and his mum then acquired residency through marriage.

Here are the statistics on approved long-stay visa applications in Germany as of 2024:

Visa Type	Number Approved	% of Total
Employment	172,422	41.14%
Studies	90,188	21.52%
Spouse Reunification	72,522	17.30%
Child Reunification	45,452	10.84%
Humanitarian Resettlement (Refugees)	10,650	2.54%
Other	9,498	2.27%
Language Course / School Attendance	8,359	1.99%
Parent Reunification	5,150	1.23%
Ethnic German Repatriates (Spätaussiedler)	4,035	0.96%
Family Reunification (Other)	551	0.13%
Jewish Immigration	281	0.07%

Why didn't I go for the spouse visa? Mainly, I did not want to put my partner in the position that our relationship status was tied up with legal systems in awkward ways, especially since he's a little younger than me and hadn't dated much before. I wanted him to stick around because he liked to, not because he had to, at least for the first few years of an in-person relationship; we didn't yet know for sure if we would enjoy living together long-term.

So I chose the most common path, which is an employment visa. This was also partly an exercise in self-worth: I wanted to prove to myself that I could convince another country my skills were valuable enough to import me.

Finding a job

I'd been coding for many years and worked with a variety of organizations, but somehow I'd never needed to search for a job before. People I knew online just sort of offered me work, or I offered to help them out, particularly during the mid-2010s when I had a long tail of interesting Twitter contacts.

By 2023 though I was less socially active online and also a bit fussier about the kind of work I was interested in. So it was time to look at job ads! My requirements were:

• English working language
• Interesting/meaningful project (i.e. not adtech)
• At or above market rate salary (for Germany)
• Employee stock ownership plan

I started on LinkedIn, but found it hard to filter the jobs there to what I was looking for. I had more luck on Glassdoor. In total I made 31 applications, started interviewing for 5 of them, and received 2 offers. For the 3 applications where I made it to interview but did not get an offer, I was rejected by one of them; the other two I declined to continue with because I had already accepted another position.

I was using a plain text CV at first and did not get many interviews. Something that actually helped me a lot was watching a video about German CV formats. I then redesigned the CV with a nice layout, using html exported to pdf, and included a photo, my birth date and nationality. Revealing so much personal info feels a little uncomfortable, but I guess it inspires trust? My interview rate on applications jumped from 0/14 to 5/17.

Interviewing was actually super fun! At least Type 2 fun in the sense that I enjoyed having done it afterwards. Because I applied to meaningful projects, I was generally talking with optimistic people who cared about what they were doing and were excited to tell me about it. This is a great thing to do for your faith in humanity.

The first offer I ended up getting was from a Uniklinikum working on early cancer detection software using microfluidic cartridges to analyze extracellular vesicles in blood plasma. They had good research results from this and wanted to start turning it into a product/company.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to work on a university project again (having already done that a couple times), but the project was just so cool and obviously valuable to society that I decided to go forward with them. Unfortunately, this didn't work out...

German bureaucracy strikes

I had heard a lot of warnings before moving here that institutional processes could be outdated or poorly optimized compared to other high-income countries. Many things have improved a lot in recent years: I was able to sign up for health insurance and a tax id entirely online, and I've never needed to touch a fax machine. As of last month, online Anmeldung is now possible here in Dresden.

However, I had one very poor experience with German bureaucracy. Even though the cancer research group wanted to employ me, and I wanted to work with them, the university administration and the state made it so difficult that I eventually gave up.

I am a self-taught senior software engineer with a bachelor's degree in genetics from the University of Melbourne. This totally baffled the university! They could not figure out where I would fit on the TV-L academic payscale. They deliberated on it for about three weeks, during which they did not reply to my emails, and so I continued interviewing with other potential employers.

Finally, they came back and said I would need to submit my degree to the German government for a statement of comparability check. Here's a quote from the email I got:

Note that the check involves sending physical copies of a signed document to Germany, costs 200 Euros, is "advertized" to take three months, and only starts after payment reception. We cannot help you avoid the fee or delays, but we (or anybody else in Germany of whom you can ask a favor) can ship the physical copy if you e-mail a high-res scan or manage to put a high-res image of your signature into the electronic document.

I was frustrated by this on a number of levels, but especially by the fact that this was a frontend web development position that I would have been well-qualified for even without the 15-year-old science degree. Having studied biology just meant I had some helpful context for the biomedical details of the software.

Meanwhile, I had finished interviewing with a robotics company working on modernizing the German manufacturing industry. Their software was being used by customers to produce things like heat pumps and electric cars in a more efficient way, which I thought was also quite important work. They were able to send me a detailed offer with a specific salary number and ESOP plan mere hours after the final interview. So I accepted that one instead!

Flying to Germany

Now equipped with a concrete job offer, I could apply for the visa itself. I was initially delighted to learn that this could be done online. But... only partially. I would've been required to make a biometrics appointment at a German mission to complete the process. And as far as I could tell, the only German mission in Australia which handled visa-related matters was the Consulate General in Sydney, ~700km away via a 12 hour train ride.

That's when I read this:

Australian citizens as well as citizens of Canada, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States of America can apply for a residence permit after entering Germany at the local immigration authority, without applying for a visa beforehand.

So I decided that if I had to undertake an expensive and bothersome trip anyway, I might as well just go directly to Germany and apply there. I submitted notice for my lease in Melbourne, donated or ditched most of my physical possessions, and booked a flight to Nürnberg, where my boyfriend had rented a short-term apartment for us via Wunderflats.

Importantly, I had booked a round-trip flight with a refundable return ticket, not a one-way flight. Border control can understandably get super spooked if you try to enter a country visa-free with a one-way ticket (I'd previously run into this problem travelling in the US). Still, ditching my Melbourne apartment at this stage was pretty risky: if the visa application didn't work out, I'd have to find somewhere to live in Australia again from scratch.

It took two flights and a bus to reach Nürnberg for a total travel time of 24 hours. On arrival in January, I realized I had totally underdressed and felt like I was going to freeze to death in my light rain jacket while waiting for the landlord to let us in. Don't underestimate snow, Australians!

Getting the EU Blue Card

After arriving in Nürnberg and registering my address, I filled out my EU Blue Card application online via the Mein Nürnberg website. It's cool that this was possible online, though a bit odd that the individual city was running their own web app for it. I think this is one example of how Germany is still quite a decentralized federal republic where individual states and municipalities can exercise significant power.

I submitted the application on 22 January and received the residence permit on 15 March, 7 weeks and 4 days later. In retrospect this was pretty standard processing time and the system mostly worked well. But my goodness were those weeks stressful! I wasn't allowed to work, was losing money, and had no idea if I would be permitted to stay in the country.

I think the processing time would have been less scary for me if I knew what was happening. It's like a black box where you put in some pdfs and wait for a loading spinner to decide how your whole life goes. The city would only reply to my messages with a generic template saying they could not give more information over email, and I couldn't get through to a human on the phone.

Eventually it worked out. At around the 6 week mark the HR department at work was finally able to call them successfully and verify that yes, the application was being processed (thank you HR!). I then at last received the glorious email saying "we have processed your application", was given a biometrics appointment, and walked away with my precious Aufenthaltstitel.

Our short-term lease in Nürnberg expired a few weeks later, and we moved to Dresden where the robots were to begin a new chapter of our lives.

Life in Germany

The wealthy Western social democracies of the world are all pretty similar places to live in fundamental ways. This is particularly true if you are a reclusive nerd like me and your life mostly happens on the computer anyway. So adapting to German culture hasn't been particularly shocking.

The most significant difference is of course the language, which I'll talk about in a bit. There are a few other interesting quirks though, like with food!

• Germany has a dessert called Spaghettieis, which is ice cream extruded in a noodly fashion to resemble spaghetti. This is absolutely ridiculous to me and I love it.
• In Australia, the Kinder Surprise is beloved by children for unifying the esteemed fields of chocolate, hidden treasure, and weird toys. To my surprise, Kinder is actually an entire brand of different chocolates here, not just the mysterious egg!
• German supermarkets sell many products containing "quark", a form of dairy I've never seen before. It's like... spongy light yoghurt? I think the closest product in Australia is "Fruche". It's quite delicious.

You do have to be aware that grocery stores are fully closed on Sunday; restaurants are generally open on Sunday and then closed on Monday instead. And don't be noisy during the Ruhezeit.

Occasionally, you will witness echoes here that make the trauma of recent human history suddenly feel uncomfortably concrete. Our apartment building in Dresden was recently evacuated because an unexploded 550-pound British WWII bomb was discovered under a local collapsed bridge. This kind of thing happens surprisingly often, but thanks to careful disposal work it only rarely leads to explosions or injuries.

There is also a huge communist propaganda mural here in Dresden which was erected by the GDR in the 1960s; there were more such works at the time, but only a few were preserved after reunification for the historical value. The legacy of the divided Germany can be seen in the stark demographic differences that remain between the East and West to this day. I find this fascinating, but of course it's much more personal for the people who grew up here!

The language gap

In 2025, English is used as an international lingua franca and business language across much of Europe. The other day I overhead a conversation between a native German speaker and a native Danish speaker talking to each other in English while travelling in Czechia, which natively speaks Czech. This kind of thing warms my pluralist international heart!

So for many basic communication needs, if you already speak English you can get along pretty well in Germany without mastering German, particularly in professional contexts or urban centers with younger populations. Automated translation is also extremely good these days when given appropriate context to work with.

However, that doesn't mean you should ignore the native language. English may be fine for a foreigner passing through, but it's not sufficient to build a life here. Knowing German to at least the A1 level is required for a blue card holder to attain a settlement permit, and B1 is required to settle a bit faster or to pursue citizenship through naturalization.

I started learning German before coming to the country, but my progress has been slower than I would like. I didn't vibe too well with Duolingo and spent quite a bit of time prototyping my own language-learning app, which was a lot of fun, but I haven't yet been able to find a design that I feel is sufficiently superior to existing solutions. So far, my favorite way to learn is watching German-dubbed TV shows with my boyfriend and asking him when I don't understand something.

Not speaking German well can be quite socially isolating. While things like meetings or Slack messages at work are usually in English, I miss out on a lot of lunch gossip or team events where I'm not yet able to participate effectively. And I hate making people switch to English in those contexts, because it feels like an imposition on them. This compounds a bit with my natural shyness. I haven't yet found the courage to join a local board game group or a gym, for example.

Nevertheless, I am gradually picking things up and this issue will resolve with time and greater efforts on my part. I have started live German lessons on Lingoda to get some speaking practice (which work helpfully pays for). I'm currently reading Die unendliche Geschichte and would now very much like to befriend a Glücksdrache.

Next steps & takeaways

Moving to another country is a difficult but rewarding experience. I feel like it has given me a greater appreciation for the richness of human diversity, and lots of respect for those attempting similar moves under more dire circumstances than mine. At the same time, it's also not as hard as it can seem. In modern times, if you have a few prereqs and want to hug people on the other side of the planet, you can just go ahead and do that.

Next year I will be able to apply for a permanent settlement permit. I currently plan to remain in Dresden until at least 2028 when my boyfriend will have completed his Master's degree at the university here and my stock options in the robotics company are fully vested. Depending on how things develop, we can then decide whether to continue in Dresden (which is a beautiful city) or look at prospects elsewhere in the EU.

My priority for now is to master the language, do a good job with the robots, enjoy life with my partner, and maybe do some more writing or personal projects like this when I have time.

If you're a friend and happen to find yourself in Dresden: let's go to the Eiscafé together!