SANCHEZ LOTERO Adriana, 42: The physicist from Colombia has a doctorate in her subject and has lived and worked for several years with her German husband in Villach. From her experiences as a non-EU country member in three EU countries (Italy, Germany and Austria) she is amazed that there is no standardized EU policy on immigration.
I come from South America, more precisely from Bogotà, the capital of Colombia. I grew up there, went to a state school and studied Physics at the National University of Colombia. Getting accepted there was a great opportunity for me on the one hand because of the narrow selection process – in my year only 60 Physics students were admitted, from which only 3 graduated – and on the other hand because only token tuition fees were asked for. My family wouldn’t have been able to finance my university education otherwise.
After I completed my Physics degree and Masters I went to Italy. That was in 1999. The International Centre of Theoretical Physics in Trieste offers especially good graduates from developing countries scholarships for a degree programme in Physics or Mathematics. I went to Germany for the subsequent PhD work where I did research at the Max Planck Institute in Dresden. Afterwards I wanted to go back to my home country Columbia, which had been my original plan.
Then I got to know this charming young German physicist at the institute and that changed my previous plans: I decided to look for work in Dresden after I got the PhD. After a short while I found a job as a physicist in a large company, initially as a student trainee, then a few weeks later finally a permanent position. In the following year the charming young German physicist and I got married. At the time my residence permit was altered to ‘family member’ which astonished me to be honest because I was still working and despite being married I see myself as an independent individual.
Everything looked rosy until my employer went bankrupt in 2009 and all 3,000 employees lost their jobs. At the same time my husband lost his employment. It was at the time of the financial crisis and our search for work was therefore turning out to be difficult. I had a number of interviews but only got rejection letters.
I made use of this phase of my life to learn German intensively. I hadn’t needed German very much till then. In research the working language is English and the language I spoke with my husband was also English. I had taken part in a German course programme with my employer in Dresden and taken the B1 examination with negligible success. So English was the unofficial business language there. While looking for a job it became clear to me how important it is to have a good knowledge of German if you want to work in German-speaking countries.
After looking for half a year I finally got a job offer, however not in Germany but in Austria. The company’s only condition was that my husband moved there with me. The ‘family member’ title of the EU citizen had suddenly become my trump card – such is the irony of fate – which the company would use to hire me without having to go through the key worker procedure! Soon afterwards my husband got a job here too.
In the meantime my husband and I have settled into Villach very well. We appreciate the short distances around town and the nearness of Italy and Slovenia. We like the mountains and the lakes. The Alps-Adriatic area offers so many opportunities, we’ll never get bored.
I’m particularly happy though about the current stability in my life. When you come from a non-EU country to the EU you live with lots of uncertainties: you have to acclimatize to other ways of doing things, to another language and another culture. You don’t know the local laws for foreigners in detail and so you try particularly hard to obey all rules and regulations.
Furthermore there’s a constant existential pressure: what happens if my scholarship in Italy ends and I don’t immediately then find a PhD position? Or while I was doing the doctorate in Germany, first of all I had a work visa for two years but the next visas were limited to only six months and always had to be applied for again. For the temporary residence permit for the time between the PhD and my first job I had to bridge the gap with the help of a declaration of commitment in which I had to among other things provide evidence that I had financial reserves and wouldn’t be a burden on the German state.
Regarding the experiences that I’ve had as a non-EU country family member in three EU member states (Italy, Germany and Austria), I’m particularly amazed that there’s no standardized EU policy on immigration; neither between the individual EU states nor within the federal states of the EU countries. I can see a huge need for harmonization. And in the management of mixed marriages (EU citizens to non-EU country partners), both marriage partners and their joint children all being treated the same legally.
My greatest restriction – if you can call it that - has to do with planning holidays: we can’t spontaneously make a decision, but have to plan well in advance because I as a Colombian have different visa conditions to my German husband. A naturalization, a German passport, would simplify all that. But in my heart I’m still very much a Colombian! 27.12.2013