Dear Germany, I don’t trust you either. Maybe a proper good-bye is bound to happen soon.
I am enraged. I am sad. 15 years of disparity while life is passing by. We can only make lemonade and keep moving forward... I guess.
The Silicon Valley Realization
As we sat in a café near University Avenue, he pulled out his phone and showed me photos of his parents — smiling beside him on campus, cooking together in his apartment, strolling through the palm-lined streets.
It was an ordinary scene, but it hit me hard. Because just hours earlier, I had received an email from the German Embassy in Beirut: visa rejected.
My parents had applied months ago — again — to visit me and my family in Berlin for Christmas and New Year’s. We’d been working on this since before the pandemic. Each application meant a struggle just to book an appointment at the embassy — sometimes an eighteen-month wait. Then a costly trip for my seventy-six-year-old father to Beirut. Hundreds of euros in non-refundable fees. Another thousand to obtain and translate the endless documents they demand.
My parents have never visited my home in Germany. They have never met my boyfriend, never seen my cats, never walked through Friedrichshain — the chaotic, beautiful neighborhood where I’ve lived for over a decade, in the country I now hold citizenship in.
The rejection came in less than seven working days — a template answer, impersonal and unreasoned, from an embassy infamous among Levant Countries for its dysfunction. The email ended with a single line that still echoes in my head:
“We no longer accept appeals.”
No right to contest. No human on the other side. Just bureaucracy sealing off empathy behind an automated door.
What makes this absurd isn’t only that I’m now a German citizen — it’s that I’m also a contributor to the system. I vote. I donate to the SPD. I pay thousands of euros in taxes every month. Not me nor anyone in my family considered leaving home to be refugees in Germany. I’m part of the productive, educated class Germany claims to want more of. Yet when I try to bring my aging parents for a simple family visit, I’m treated as if I’m plotting an asylum application in disguise.
Meanwhile, across the ocean, my friend in the U.S. — a Syrian passport holder, not even a citizen — can host his parents freely. The U.S. isn’t the only example. When I worked in the UAE, it took me a 5min application to bring my family for a visit. In France, one of my closest friends — also without French citizenship — can invite his parents without turning it into a multi-year administrative war.
So the difference isn’t between “the West and the rest,” or between rich and poor countries. And it isn’t even between America and Germany. It’s between systems that assume good faith until proven otherwise, and a system that assumes bad faith by default if your name, origin, or passport triggers the wrong code in a bureaucratic matrix.
Sometimes I can’t help but wonder: at what point did Germany decide that working-immigrant families are presumed scammers by default? What lazy ***** decided that a return flight, good income and a signature of never ever taking benefits from the government not now nor in the future is not enough to enable a family reunification for Christmas?
I sat for a long time staring at the rejection email. Not angry — just hollow. It was one of those moments when a quiet truth becomes impossible to ignore: in Germany, I may hold the passport, but it will never feel home.
My father — a mechanical engineering graduate from the University of Regensburg, who worked and paid taxes in Bavaria and Hamburg throughout the 1980s — seems destined never to see Germany again. The same country where he once helped build, now sees him as a threat.
The Bureaucracy That Thinks It‘s Moral
Discrimination in Germany doesn’t usually shout; it signs papers. It hides behind stone-cold mis-delivered life-changing letters, appointment numbers, and “standard procedures.” It calls itself fairness — but it treats difference as risk and adaptive-empathy as immoral.
After my parents’ latest visa rejection, I found myself considering something I’d never imagined: suing the government. Usually we apply again but maybe this time we sue. Not because I believe it would change much, but because there’s no other channel left to be heard.
Suing in Germany is not an act of empowerment — it’s an act of despair. You don’t sue to win; you sue to register existence. The process is slow, inhumane, and mostly symbolic. There is no Schmerzensgeld — no compensation for emotional or time loss when it comes to confronting the government. The bureaucracy doesn’t have to admit mistakes because the system is designed to protect itself first. And edge-cases like ours are swapped under dusty papers in superiority-complex unreachable shelves.
That’s what makes it so psychologically exhausting: you can follow every rule, and still end up unheard. And this isn’t new.
Back in 2013, I was working at Bonial, part of Axel Springer, on a Blue Card residency. On paper, that made me “highly qualified.” In practice, it didn’t matter.
I still had to wake up at four in the morning and stand in line outside the Ausländerbehörde with hundreds of newly arrived Syrian refugees. The system didn’t see me as a professional with a residence permit; it saw “Syrian.” My education, my tax record, my job — all irrelevant. My passport had decided my queue.
How is that not a new form of racism — one that hides behind queue numbers and data fields? How should I expect from an average Brandeburg-Voter to see me as an individual when the political elites of this system ruled-out that all Ukrainians, all Syrians, all Afghans… all are the same taste and color of whatever passport their parents hold.
That same year, before leaving Bonial to start my first company, I did what responsible immigrants do: I wrote to the immigration office, asking whether I could quit my job and found my own startup. They replied, in writing: Yes. Six months later, I received a letter declaring my residence no longer valid because I had quit Bonial. When I went to the office to clarify, the woman behind the glass said coldly, “That is not me who sent you this letter.”
For the next two years, while running a company and employing people, I lived under a Fiktionsbescheinigung — a temporary status for people the system can’t categorize. Every few months, I had to present yet another five-year business plans — more than any investor would ever ask for.
It wasn’t personal hatred. It was worse. It was indifference. Because malice can be confronted; indifference cannot.
It’s written into systems, into software fields that don’t allow exceptions, into processes that treat empathy as inefficiency.
A friend of mine, another Syrian founder, raised more than a million euros for his startup. Yet the same bureaucracy refused to let him be employed in his own GmbH because, as a Syrian passport holder, the system automatically routed him through the refugee track.
When the rules don’t recognize your existence, success becomes an exception to be managed — not a story to be celebrated.
Years later, the same pattern repeated with my sister’s children. After finally getting their visas approved, the kids were placed in a Willkommensklasse — a “welcome class” meant for integration. It sounds kind, but it’s segregation by another name. Classes run from 2:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., isolating them from regular school life.
We found places in better schools with morning classes and extracurriculars, but the School-Amt refused.
The system is built to manage refugees in a pan-European political greed, not empower families.
Not that it matters if you use social benefits in tough phases of your life, but in their own lazy logic, it didn’t matter to them, that neither I nor my sister had ever taken a cent from the state — the logic was fixed: Syrian = dependent. And it’s not just Syrians or Afghans or Turks. Today, the same pattern applies to Ukrainians and Russians — all treated not as individuals but as passport categories. And all treated with the same superiority recipe: Why bother, those are useless cases anyway.
From the moment they appear in a foreigner-office database, their potential, stability, or contribution is secondary to the nationality code attached to their file. That reduction has economic consequences far beyond immigration policy.
When people are systematically categorized by passport, it quietly follows them into the private sector — into salary negotiations, hiring decisions, and investor meetings. It weakens their bargaining power before they ever open their mouths.
A founder carrying a “non-EU” or “politically risky” passport is seen as higher friction — harder to hire, harder to relocate, harder to insure, no matter what their education or track-record is. And that bias compounds.
It explains why less than 1 % of startups in Germany are founded by new-arriving immigrants — despite immigrants being, statistically, more educated than the national average.
Talent is not missing. Trust is.
And this logic doesn’t stop at the foreigner’s office. It trickles down into the culture itself — teaching even ordinary Germans that passports define worth.
When institutions quietly rank people by origin, extremists simply repeat that logic louder. Bureaucracy lays the foundation; ideology just decorates it.
I’ve paid into the system since 2008, starting with my first student job and continuing through years of entrepreneurship and high-tax contributions. Yet I’ve spent much of that time explaining my existence — to officers, landlords, banks, even schools.
Every Syrian, Afghani, Iraqi, Iranian, Turkish, Ukrainian, or Russian professional I know has their version of this story: questioned twice as much, waiting twice as long, receiving half the trust.
I, like many, used to think that if I worked hard enough, paid enough, integrated enough, the system would eventually see me for what I am — a citizen, a contributor. But I was wrong. The system does not adapt. It does not evolve toward contribution. It just keeps categorizing people into the boxes it built decades ago.
Germany likes to imagine that racism is something visible, loud, and foreign — something that happens elsewhere: in the United States, in UAE, Britain, or perhaps conveniently in the “East German States.” That last one is the comfortable myth — that prejudice lives somewhere else, in a forgotten geography, rather than in the national DNA of the system itself. Racism here is procedural. It hides behind efficiency.
The people who design these processes — from embassies to visa desks — are rarely trained in empathy or cultural understanding. They apply rules without context and call that equality.
But equality without flexibility isn’t justice. It’s control. And order without empathy isn’t virtue. It’s quiet cruelty.
That’s Germany’s moral paradox: it believes that by being orderly, it is being fair. But fairness without trust is still discrimination — only written in administrative language.
And so, even after citizenship, people like me remain in a strange in-between: too refugee to be respected, too German to be understood. We are citizens by paper — suspects by default.
Yet I want to be clear: this isn’t written from exile or bitterness. Berlin — especially Friedrichshain — is home. Lebanon or Syria, where my parents come from, stopped being home long ago. My favorite bars, my best friends, my most vivid memories — they all live within those streets.
I don’t say these things because I feel I don’t belong. I say them because I do belong — and because belonging should mean the right to help shape the culture, not just to silently absorb it.
Integration should never mean erasure. It should be dialogue — the same kind that Germans themselves practice whenever they move abroad, whether they’re debating tipping culture in the U.S. or work hierarchies in Asia. If questioning and contributing are signs of engagement abroad, why are they treated as defiance at home?
Beyond Borders and Labels
Sometimes I wonder if this will ever change — if a system built on distrust can ever truly learn to trust.
This morning, walking through San Francisco on my way to the office, I felt the contrast so sharply it almost hurt. Here, people don’t ask where you’re from. They ask what you’re working on. It’s such a simple shift, but it changes everything.
In this city, you are defined by your ideas, not your documents. No one cares what your passport looks like, what your parents’ visa status is, if you speak in an accent or whether your last name sounds local enough. People care about what you’re building — about how you think, what problem you’re solving, what excites you.
That’s the beauty of places built on creation rather than control: they give you space to exist before judging whether you deserve it.
Germany taught me discipline, precision, and structure — the value of doing things properly. But here, walking through the messy, ambitious energy of San Francisco, I see what Germany never understood: that systems meant to protect fairness can also suffocate possibility. A society that distrusts flexibility will always mistake control for stability. Where people like me have to constantly justify our existence, in the chaos of inefficient efficiency.
I used to believe belonging was something you earned through compliance — that if I followed the rules, paid my taxes, learned the language, contributed to the system, eventually it would see me as one of its own. But belonging is not compliance. It’s recognition. It’s the simple dignity of being seen as a full person without having to constantly justify your presence.
As I crossed Market Street, I thought about how much emotional energy I’ve spent over the years explaining myself — to officers, to administrators, to institutions that only see risk where they should see value. That’s the real cost of rigid systems: they drain the human potential they claim to regulate.
And yet, I don’t walk away from Germany in bitterness. I walk away in understanding.
Understanding that strength without openness becomes fragility. That progress without trust becomes paperwork. That the future doesn’t belong to countries that perfect control — it belongs to those that cultivate possibility.
San Francisco is far from perfect. It’s chaotic, expensive, and flawed in its own ways. But it understands one truth that I wish Berlin did: people don’t build the future out of fear. They build it out of freedom.
And maybe that’s why I’m still here — because in this city, for the first time in a long time, I don’t feel like I have to ask permission just to exist.
What It Would Take to Return
I’m still not sure if I’ll return to Berlin. Part of me wants to — the part that still believes in what Germany could be if it ever lived up to its ideals. To its geographical location. To its pre nazi science and culture contribution. But belief alone isn’t enough anymore. Systems don’t change through speeches or slogans. They change when responsibility is placed where it actually matters. Not somewhere else in the east or blue painted signs.
If Germany truly wants to build a fair and future-ready society, it doesn’t need more protests about welcoming refugees. It needs investment in the people who make the system work — the ones who sit behind the counters of foreigners offices, embassies, and visa departments across the country.
These people decide the fate of millions, yet they receive no serious training in empathy, intercultural awareness, or service. They are asked to implement laws written by people who are perhaps too lazy to consider diversity and “strangers” lives, in a highly competitive global world.
If we want fairness, we have to humanize administration — teach compassion as a professional skill, not a personal luxury.
And if Europe wants to compete with the rest of the world, it needs to start acting like one market, not 27 small ones.
Our problem isn’t innovation; it’s fragmentation. Startups die at the border between two member states because laws, taxes, local-cultures fanaticism and company structures change every few kilometers.
While we’re debating integration and if a brown person can talk loud in an U-bahn or not, the U.S. and China are scaling technologies that define the next century. Not because they are smarter, but because they operate in semi-unified, frictionless markets. Europe could too — if it stopped treating different mobility and entrepreneurship as exceptions to be controlled and started seeing them as engines of prosperity.
I am not scared of AfD. The extreme right in Germany.
I experienced Megdeburg, Erfurt and Brandenburg; I’ve met their voters, spoken to them, shared meals with them. Most are not monsters — just people scared of losing meaning in a changing world. They campaign for the wrong cause at the wrong time. And that’s why they don’t scare me. It’s just the unfortunate and pitiful feeling I have for that uneducated blue AfD German voter.
What does scare me however is the thought of my father dying before I can see him again — not because of fate, not because of doing the wrong things, but because of cold-hearted bureaucrats. That’s what keeps me awake at night. That’s what makes me question whether a country that prides itself on reason can continue to refuse to upgrade what its identity should be.
So no, I don’t know yet if I’ll return to Berlin.
But if I ever do, it will be to a Germany that has learned that compassion is not weakness, that bureaucracy is not morality, and that the future will not wait for those still busy proving they’re right. Or when I am sure, I have another home somewhere else beside Berlin, Lebanon, Syria, Dubai and all the rest of the homes I lost.
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