Reply to post: It's not just Brexit

Not auf wiedersehen – yet! The Berlin scene tempting Brexit tech

sebt
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It's not just Brexit

"For employees themselves, a UK working visa costs more than £400 (€477), but for Germany it's £50 (€60)."

A lot of the completely unnecessary hassle in the UK predates the Brexit referendum - although Brexit will undoubtedly make it even worse.

There's a kind of punitive aspect to any kind of bureaucracy in the UK, and this applies of course especially to immigration issues. Because it's OK to make life hard for dose darned furriners - but actually that's not the whole story: Government, or rather privatised/semi-privatised Government agencies, do their level best to make life hard for anyone, British or foreign, who tries to deal with them.

The idea of an infrastructure which works smoothly and efficiently, allowing you to concentrate your energies on more interesting and productive things, has become just a memory in the UK. Maybe this is supposed to be some kind of "market incentive" to turn you into a 14-hours-a-day City trader and buy yourself into a minimally decent world.

I'm going to be doing postgraduate study in Europe, and the impression I've got is that no-one over there is in the slightest interested in making life hard for me. Sure, I may end up on a higher fee level if all goes pear-shaped in the negotiations (or, God forbid, if Boris is allowed within the country's borders to personally to deliver a series of hilarious schoolboy insults), but the bureaucracy will just be a matter of fill in these forms, prove you speak the language, pay €50, wait a while and there you go.

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