Written on 01 November 2025.

Being A Migrant in Germany

We were forced to leave our home in Venezuela after government supporters attempted to kill my mother. I cut short my undergraduate degree and travelled to Germany, where I sought refuge.

I was determined to continue studying, convinced that education would be my way forward. But the German system made it hard for someone like me to get in. My Venezuelan high school diploma wasn’t equivalent to a German one. I could only access university by taking a year-long preparatory course, which required passing a competitive entrance exam.

On exam day, I stood in line with dozens of non-European students. Another Venezuelan there had studied at the Humboldt School, one of Caracas’s most elite institutions. Around us were students from Lebanon, China, Nigeria, Brazil – graduates of international schools, fluent in German and English, prepped to circulate globally.

I didn’t make the cut. Only a small number of places were available, and they went to those who’d had access to the very best education in their countries of origin. What struck me most wasn’t the rejection. It was the realisation that the same unequal systems I had seen in Latin America were also present in Europe.

Meritocracy, I learned, had prerequisites: elite schooling, language and cultural fluency, the right kind of passport. Those lacking these forms of capital were turned away at the door, barred from continuing our education. Instead, we were rerouted into low-wage labour.

I took a manual labour job on a production line at an industrial bakery. Hired through a subcontracting agency, I worked shifts before dawn, packaging bread. Many coworkers were Syrian refugees with similar language barriers. We were rotated in and out, denied long-term contracts, benefits, and permanence.

Labour migration magnifies divisions, exacerbating rather than ameliorating inequality

Our presence caused tension among the permanent staff. Many were migrants* as well, and they seemed to think our presence threatened their relative security. This micro-hierarchy showed me that in competitive systems, social distinctions get reproduced even between migrant groups. Germany’s labour market, like its education system, sorts migrants by their accumulated resources: diplomas, accents, skin colour and legal status. To the bakery, we weren’t students or refugees. We were just cheap labour. But the workforce had sorted itself into a clear pecking order.

Two years later, I found a way out. An American liberal arts college in Berlin accepted my Venezuelan diploma, offered English-language programmes and provided scholarships. As part of my college application, I submitted short stories I had written to reflect on my life as an immigrant in Germany. My fluency in English and literary interests – forms of cultural capital shaped by my middle-class upbringing – were finally legible. Bard College Berlin (BCB) offered me a way to bypass the gate that had so far kept me out.

I was lucky to find a way out. I eventually gained credentials, then recognition, then access. My story could be read as a narrative of escape from these global regimes of cheap labour production – proof that migration is a global mechanism for levelling up. But it’s rather a story of class and racial privilege. I bypassed systems of labour extraction not only through effort, but through the cultural capital my class and light skin afforded me. It didn’t have to be that way. Many of the other migrants who worked with me at the factory are still packaging bread.