Gotta love Germany
They were always very generous to me with residence permits as well (providing I followed the rules and had the right paperwork). I know that Germany isn’t perfect but lately I’ve started to think they are the only people left who really understood the lessons of WWII.
Me + Richard Armitage 
I wish… sigh
But I was happy too when I saw that tweet, because it’s the right thing to do
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It is (and I admire it as the US has a lot of problems on this score and a lot less ot lose by letting people stay legally) and it makes you wonder why the UK didn’t make the same guarantees to its EU residents immediately.
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To use them as political leverage during the negotiations?
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That was the reason I kept reading, too — another reason to despise the Tories.
It’s a serious problem here, too. Our politicians do nothing, or put obstacles in the way of doing anything, and meanwhile people’s lives are affected. For instance, I feel like there is a serious risk that the “Dreamers” will still be in the same limbo in 2024 than they were in in 2016.
(dreamer: person who came to the US illegally as a child, having been brought by family members, and grew up here with no connection to their country of citizenship)
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Well to be honest the Bundesregierung risks very little with this decision, but it’s nevertheless great.
The situation with your dreamers is horrible and to take the decent road to help other people or even sympathize with them seems to get more impossible with every day.
Sorry for my pessimism but the last few days here were horrible (politicallly speaking)…
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I still look at the SZ and ARD pages fairly regularly, so I totally sympathize with you. It’s probably no consolation to know that at least you’re not in the worst situation. There seem to still be decent people in power in Germany. A few, at least.
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That’s true. But after the Landtagswahlen in the fall the situation might escalate even more and let’s not talk about the next Bundestagswahl….but yeah, hopefully there is no blond haired brother from another mother of your 45 or BoJo to take over from Merkel.
You have to be thankful for the little things 😉
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If there really is a no-deal Brexit, I predict the center parties will get a boost out of that just because it will be such a shitstorm. But I wish it didn’t have to come to that.
There’s this story from the 30s in the U.S., that President Roosevelt wasn’t very liberal, but he realized that if nobody did anything for working people, the US could very well go fascist (as Spain, Italy and Germany did) and so the social measures of those days were hedge against authoritarianism. I wonder if we’re not getting there again in the U.S. and I keep asking people if we really need the total destruction of a WWIII to learn this lesson, or if we don’t already know better?
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Me too. I still think Brexit is a bad idea, for the UK and the EU.
But at the moment I am so sick and tired of all the sh*it leavers spread as their truth, that my attitude changed and now I think: Just go and be done with it already
Do you get an answer? Or only wide-eyed stares and shrugs?
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I am ashamed to actually find out about this magnanimous gesture via RA (rather than the news). It makes me happy to see our government take such steps. That it is happening here does not surprise me at all, even despite the re-surge of right-wing extremism. Germany is literally in the (geographic) centre of Europe, was the place where East and West met. The EU was a way of creating a framework that supported peace and prevented war. Brexit threatens this framework – and Germany is trying to hold the EU together…
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Indeed, the central motivating impulse of the EU was “no more of these destructive pan European wars.” I should give France a lot of credit, too, as it is very much a joint project. Just Germany made the news today as opposed to France. The motivations behind the EU also show that there are still people who learned the lessons of the destructive 19th and 20th centuries.
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🙂
Back to 1926 Paneuropa!
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True. The EU (EEC) was dreamt up not only by Germany but also by France. Credit to them, too.
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