 So this talk will be in English because it might be a bit of a disappointment for you in the audience. This talk is not for you. I'm sorry. This talk is for you at the computer and you see me through the camera now. This talk is not for you in the audience because you live here, you are here and I hope you are not a political refugee. But some people in the United States seem to be or turn out to be political refugees. We heard the case of Chelsea Manning who can't leave the country. We heard of different whistleblowers who left the country who can't leave the country. I don't know why this is not. First of all, my name is Sarah Johnson. I'm the laser lady. I'm a bit nervous because I'm on completely new territory for me. I worked in the mid-90s in the House of Refugees during the Civil War in Europe. I worked there for one year. This is my experience with refugees. That's all my experience. I'm not a lawyer. I have no clue what I'm talking about. This talk is for folks who live in the United States who are US citizens. If you want to have more information, there are some links. It is the German Embassy. It is a Bundesamt für Migration. Some German terms. The websites are in English as well. Look at it and read it. They have more detailed information that I can give you. My intention is to give you some starting information if you are in a troubled situation, if you need to leave the country now, then I hope this talk will help you. As I said, reasons to leave. You can be a whistleblower whose cover is not far from being blown. You belong, for example, to the LGBTI community. North Carolina has very strong laws against transgender persons. This might be a reason. Police violence is one issue. There are many reasons to leave the country, also for economic reasons. For example, you want to go to university. You want to make a degree and you face the high institutions fees. You don't want to be in debt for the rest of your life for a few years of university. Come to Germany. There are some other reasons like seeing a beautiful country. Germany is a very beautiful country. I hope in the audience you all agree. This is one point why going to Germany. It is a beautiful country. We have free university. We have a good social system. We have a very affordable health insurance. That works and it is not limited. If you pay minimum into the health insurance and you get cancer and you need 100,000 euros of surgery and so on, it is covered. You never run out of coverage. You don't end up with the question, do I buy some food or do I go to a doctor? You go to a doctor and you buy your food. We have a quite a stable political system. It might be a bit boring, but we have a few larger, smaller political parties. We have a two chamber parliament. In the end, we have a decent government. Everyone here is angry about the German government, but in the end, if we draw a line and compare it to other countries, yes, we have a stable government. We have a good infrastructure. If you ever enjoyed driving 200s kph on an Autobahn, it is legal on some parts and the Autobahn is mostly in a good condition. You don't get cut off by electricity because of a storm, because of snow. We are not cut off from your telephone line because some poles collapsed, so we have a good infrastructure. We have a very rich culture. Gute, Schiller, painters, sculptures, theater players, actors and so on. Yes, it is quite a decent culture and we have a very interesting history. We have the second world war. This was only six years in German history of thousands of years. We had the Nazi time for 12 years in total, which is also very small. We had the first world war. In between, we had great times of culture and development. Take a look at the literature. It is quite rich. We have two seas. We have the mountains. We have beautiful countryside. We have fantastic cities like Hamburg, Cologne, Karlsruhe as well. Yes, Berlin is nice as well. If you decide to come here to live here, to make a living, there are a few possibilities. The easiest one, of course, is you have a German passport and your parents migrated from Germany to the United States, kept their nationalities, so you are German by birth. Or one of your parents has a European citizenship. And depending on the system, you might have this European citizenship as well. Hop on a train, come here, make a living. Easy, totally. You should learn the language. There are some other ways which are a bit more of a long shot. It is you go to a university, make a degree, or you come here and find your work or be self-employed or employ others. There are some bits and pieces to look for, but it works. Another thing is the EU blue card, which you can get from different European countries, all of them. I will come to this later. I will come to the three last points later. What you should not do. I talked with a friend. She is a political refugee. She lives in Berlin. She dug too deep. She wrote a book. And she had to leave the country now. So this was half a year ago. She had this get the fuck out immediately situation. We talked, and she said, don't do the asylum thing. It doesn't work. Your US citizen, United States of America, is supposed as a safe country, as a safe place. So you are not in trouble then, seeing from the German law. So don't go the asylum way, please. You will go back. Lots of pain, lots of money loss. Don't do. Do the other ways. So we get into detail. There is a very, very nice law, which is fantastic. It is Article 41, Aufenthaltsverordnung. German. This says that citizens from Australia, Israel, Japan, Canada, Korea, New Zealand and United States of America can come here without a visa. You decide, okay, tomorrow I'm going to Germany. You hop on a plane, you come here, you land in Frankfurt, and you have 90 days to get your stuff sorted. This is luxury. You don't have to talk to anyone else before. You just do it. No visa needed. No visits at the embassy, at the German embassy. You just do it. It is good in a situation of get the fuck out. You don't need to talk to anyone about it. It is a bit, when you're in this situation, then you don't want to talk about your plans. It might come out. You might get arrested upfront and so. So it's a nice way to just go. You have 90 days to get your stuff sorted. Take all your original papers, university degrees, birth certificate, your passport. You need to have valid passport. Really, no copies. You can have copies, but you need mandatory to have the originals. Because if you go to the German authorities, they want to see the original. If you don't have it, you don't get the status you want to have. And then, let's be frank, you're in a deep shit. Because after 90 days, your right to stay runs out and you become illegal. You are cut off of the grit of health insurance and so on. Please, in original. Yeah, as often times, article five says it, you need to have a passport. Your identity must be clear. I don't know what, suppose, how this law says it, how this law is meant. That you have to be, that there have to be no question about your identity. Yeah, keep your papers straight. You need to have an assured living. You need to have money. Yeah, you need to have money to live in Germany. And if you want to stay, you need to have an idea how you finance yourself. You can't live off the German social security system. Not now. Not when you come here. After a couple of years, when you have a different status and you get unemployed and you have a permanent status, then you can get unemployment money. But not in the first five years. So you need to have an idea how to finance yourself. There are two, article seven. There are two types of legal status, except for the first 90 days. It is the residence permit. And there's the settlement permit. I will go into the residence permit first. This is called Aufenthalz-Alaubnis. The residence permit is limited. You can't stay forever on this, on this title. You need to do something. And then when you fulfill some requirements, then it will be changed into the settlement permit. And then you can stay. But the residence permit is always bound to a purpose, be it university, be it jobs search, be it learning German whatsoever, it is limited. And it is limited to a purpose you announce when you register in Germany. So let's go through this. You land, you have some people you know. Maybe I suppose you are in the hacking community. Maybe you have been at the C3 in Hamburg or you have at other European events. You met some German folks. You made contact to hackerspaces. For example, C-Base in Berlin, which is a fantastic and big one. You contact them and you tell them, well, I'm going to leave. I need to suffer to crash. I need a place to live. You have 90 days for this. Then you go and find a place to live. You need to have a flat for some things, for some benefits. You need to have a place. You need to have a flat. Maybe it's living together with some other people in a shared room. Not a shared room in a shared flat. We call this Wohnunggemeinschaft. You go to the authorities, you register and say, oh, I'm living at this place, at this specific address. You need to have an address in Germany. It is very difficult without a valid address. And then you go to the Foreigner's Office, the Ausländerbehörde. And before you do this, you make up your mind what you want to do, how you want to stay, what's your plan. A good idea is to contact a lawyer who is specialized in foreigners' law, foreigners staying in Germany. It's a good idea. They tell you much, much, much more than I can do. They will tell you the bits and pieces. So you get your purpose straight. Be it university, be it learning German, you have one year about preparing for university, you have two years' time to learn the language. This is your purpose. You can't change backward and forward from day to day. This is a long process. So the other thing which you, in the end, want to have if you plan to stay longer, you want to have the settlement permit. The settlement permit allows you to work wherever you want and allows you to stay. It has no purpose. It's not bound to a purpose. But you don't get it from the day one. You need to have five or more years' residency permit. You need to have an assured living. You need to be able to pay health insurance 250 euros if you are not working, if you pay it by yourself because you are self-employed 250 euros. You need to have to pay rent. You need to be able to pay tax. The taxes are a bit higher than in the United States, but it's okay. There are 80 million people living in Germany and quite a lot of them are paying tax. The taxes are pain in the ass. Yes, but you get something from it. You get fantastic out-of-bonds. You get a social system. You get good working infrastructure. So you need to have paid five or more years into the retirement and into the pension funds. If you are older than 45, there are some different laws. This is what I show you as an excerpt. Is it condensed just for the case that US citizens move to Germany? There are other cases for refugees and so on. This law is quite big, but these are just the parts you need to know. So five years into the retirement funds, you need to have a sufficient living space. You can't live in a cardboard box. You can't live under the bridge. You need to have a flat or a house or something where you can have sort of decent life. You don't need to have a fantastic palace. A Wundermeinschaft is okay. You can live in this co-living space. You need to be able to speak German. Not just a few words. Hello, Wiggetz-Danke. You need to be on the level of B1, which is okay. You can get around. You can talk to the officials. You can talk to tax employees. You can order something at the restaurant and so on. You can live in Germany and you don't always be the foreigner. You can have a conversation. This is important. It is tested. It is going to be tested. So you can't just fake it. And you also need to have quite the knowledge about the German culture political system. How Germany runs the parliaments and so on. The countries and the state and so on. But after five years, you should be able to speak some German. And you have enough time to take German courses. And they are also mandatory for some people. In the end, after five years, this shouldn't be difficult. So if you come here for education, if you want to go to university, you need to be... It's always about residency permits, not about settlement permits. Settlement permit comes later. This is a purpose thing. You need to have the purpose to get the residence permit. You need to be accepted by a German university or high school. The purpose is acceptance. So you need to have your school degrees from the United States. And you need to have the allowance in general to go to university or high school. If you have this, then you pick a university, pick your courses, pick what you want to study. And then you have two years' time to learn German. Because German universities are run in German. There are some private universities, maybe they do the English thing, but university in Germany is in German. And you need to be able to read and understand much more than hello and danke and begez. So you have two years' time. This buys you two years' time. If you go to university at the end, it's something else. But it buys you the two years. Maybe you go somewhere else. You have nine months to find a university place. It is not within the first 90 days. You have to say, you have to claim, I want to go to university. These and that and that are my school degrees. I am able to go to university. Then you have nine months' time to find a place. And then do the German learning thing. When you've finished and you made it, you got a degree, then you have 18 months' time to find a work which fits to your degree. If you studied medicine and you want to work as a software engineer, this doesn't work. If you studied something, mechanical engineering, and you just want to work in a car factory at the car manufacturing, this doesn't work. This is not the work you studied for. You need to have a certain level of work. You can't work as a bin man with a PhD. It doesn't work. They don't accept it. If you work... No, something else. We have something very fantastic in Germany besides university. This is called the Ausbildung oder Lehre. This is an apprenticeship. It is mostly three and a half years while you work in a company and you go to school, professional school. You work a couple of weeks in the company to learn the practical things. You go back to school for two, three weeks and so on and you end up with a degree. This is quite valued in Germany. This is a fantastic system. You can do this, but you need to have the approval from the Arbeitsagentur, from the employment agency. There are some bits and pieces. They have to approve it, and maybe if you want to do something electrical and there are too many electricians in that area of the country, then they might ask you to switch to become a cook, to become a chef, for example. You also have one year to find a job afterwards in your field, what you learned. If you learned electrician, you can't work as a chef, vice versa. There's something nice. That is the EU blue card. This is valid for whole Europe, so you can work and live in Germany or you can work and live in France or you can... I don't know about the UK. They have this Brexit thingy in four weeks. I don't know how it will turn out, but there are 28 European countries, EU countries, and you can live there. If you decide to go... If you like cold and snow, then you go to Sweden. If you like hot and sea, then you go to Spain or Italy. There are also some rules and regulations, some bits and pieces to get this blue card. You need to have... So you apply for this in Germany. You need to have a degree, a university degree that is at least recognized by German authorities or you have studied in Germany. Or you lived... You worked five years in a specific field and have a comparable qualification. You need to have the consent from the employment agency as well. So there's always this thing of... There's an open job position and there's a ranking. If no German is found to do this job, then it is opened to everyone else. So if a German or European citizen takes this job position, then you're out. You need to have this job opening where you can fit in. Sometimes maybe it's okay. It's a good idea that you are American citizen because you have contacts to the United States, to this way of thinking and so on. You have to work at Google or something and they want to have someone specific with these specific skills. Then it works. Salary must be okay. You can't work as a doctor for a thousand euros a month. You need to be paid within the range of the other German employees doing the same. This prevents you from underpayment. This prevents you, in a way... This is a two-sided thing. It might prevent you as well from having this job. The Ministry of Labor defines the accredited jobs and the lower limits of salary. That's how it's written the law. This is very flexible. The employment agency has to has its finger into it. As well, you shouldn't be asylum seeker. This doesn't work. You need to have a settlement permit for more than 33 months to get this. You don't find a job. You have quite some skills. You are talented to run your own business. Please, you're welcome. If you provide working space for others, perfect. You need to be independent financially. You need to... Your idea, your job idea needs to be interesting for that region. If in the city there are 30 bakeries and you want to open up bakery number 31, it's a bit questionable. If you do something with software, hardware, take... This is a good idea. It might work. Very good is if what you do has a positive effect on the job market, as I said earlier. And if you need to be funded you need to have some funding, some investment. Again, the German authorities don't want you to live of the expenses of other ones. So unemployment money and so on. You get a residency permit for maximum three years and when everything works well, your business is running, maybe you have some employees, you have this positive effect on the German economy, then you get a settlement permit. Freelance work also works. Again, must be approved, but in the end it will also lead to a residence permit. So you made it somehow. You come the first time to Germany and you want to live there. Not the first time for holidays, but you want to seriously live here, then you need to learn German. You are entitled to... You have the right to take part in German courses. And if you have the right, then you also have the obligation to learn German. If your language skills are below A1, which is in a way of hello we gates and thank you and hello and what's ever, then you need to do this course. They also teach how the German system works, how the political work system works, parliament and so on. If you don't do this, frankly you end up in deep shit. Your status can be denied and you have to go home, find another solution. So I think in most cases if you have this get the fuck out situation, you might not want to come back. So you should hang in there, learn, integrate, do something with a job, go to university, start make a living like all the other Germans. I talked with this friend about this talk and basically if you plan to go, then you take your time, make some savings. If you are like a whistleblower, you know that you do something at least questionable. If you get into this and get into the zone of being endangered by the American authorities, you might want to put some money aside that buys you time. You should do it quietly. Don't waive anything around and say I'm putting aside money for leaving, or being a potential political refugee. You just do this. You also should have an idea of what you want to do when you come to Germany. It can happen that you did something and you leave now and you had no time. So it is a very short time process and then you have to get the fuck out. But if you have the time, you are into a specific special thinking and into a scene whatsoever, then you might be prepared to leave. As I said earlier, be quiet. It is like before 1889, we had the German Democratic Republic called DDR. There were some refugees and they went to western Germany and it was a very, very dangerous journey trip. The problem was if they talked to someone, parents could be friends, close friends. They never knew if one of these persons talks to the Stasi and blames you. So you have to be quiet. Try to figure out what you want to do, what your options are, what your skills are. There are some groups on Facebook, there are some websites about how to live in Germany, how to make it, how to go there. You should read this. You should read a lot to get an idea. So what I tell you is just the first ideas, first information. So if you come here, you go to the Einwundermelderamt, this is where you get registered, where you go and you say, I live in this and that specific address. As I said, you need to have an address in Germany. So this is the first step. This is a very important one. And then you go to the Ausländerbehörden, to the foreigners authorities, so you proceed. Yeah, when you come here, it's a journey, it's a trip. It's a life experience. Take everything you can get from this experience. Learn as much as you can, enjoy as much as you can, enjoy the German beer, enjoy the weather, enjoy going to the beach, take this as an opportunity, not only, wow, how it's breaking loose, but you end up in a nice place. So I came to the end. I want to thank you, I want to thank all the folks, the US folks I met at the C3, which talked about leaving the country, because they gave me the idea of making a talk about. I want to thank Vera for her input. If you want to shoot me a mail, Sarah at laserlady.org. If you want to Twitter me, it's at excelzara.hl. Shoot me a line. And if you have some questions, please, questions. Okay, thank you very much for your attention.