I have been teaching German to a group of foreign medical professionals who moved to Leipzig a while ago and have now been preparing to sit the official German language test for medical professionals by the Chamber of Medicine of Saxony. The group members come from different countries such as Bolivia, Russia, Syria, Ukraine, Kuwait, Bulgaria and others.
One of the students is Nahkla, a dentist from Syria who speaks very good German and will certainly pass the exam is now facing expulsion from Leipzig, the city he has been living in for about six months now. Nahkla has already a contract for an internship at a dentist’s practice in Leipzig and most importantly hasn’t received any financial support from the German government or the city of Leipzig and has been paying taxes here. Yet, Denise, an employee at the Leipzig aliens’ office is forcing him to leave Leipzig and move back to another German federal state where he initially was registered regardless of the fact that he doesn’t know anyone there and won’t be able to reach the same level of integration there.
I contacted Denise via email asking her to reassess the situation and change her decision as it doesn’t make any sense. I’m sharing this with you because I do believe in democracy and the first step in any democratic process is to share situations that should be improved.
By the way, the letter Nahkla received from Denise contains a lot of legal terminology even I have difficulty understanding.
How would this logistically be done? Someone at the Leipzig office knows his address? How do they force him to leave? Do they get the police and knock on his door, and then what? What if he just moved to a different apartment? As an American, this seems very odd - I don’t think we have any way of knowing where immigrants live, or maybe I am just ignorant of the situation.
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The next step would be for Denise to present the case to a judge at the municipal court of Leipzig. He then could rule to have the expulsion carried out by the federal police who would need to locate Nahkla, put him on a train and accompany him to his new destination. Technically he could move to another apartment within the same building but then the police would find him anyway if they really wanted to.
I have read the letter Denise sent Nahkla and in my opinion she made two mistakes. The first one is that she didn’t set a clear deadline until which Nahkla has to leave the city so her demand can’t be used in court. Her second more severe mistake is that she missed the fact that Nahkla has not been receiving any financial support from the German social system. However, the laws says that this is a precondition for the expulsion to be legal. Yesterday the owner of the school where Nahkla has been doing the training course wrote an email to Denise pointing out her mistake and asking her retract her thread of expulsion immediately. At any rate it will take at least another couple of weeks until the police starts knocking on Nahkla’s door so I told him to relax and just wait.