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Priya* a 36-year old woman from Pune, had spent nine years steadily building a career in human resources at a major American corporation in the city. Sensing a lack of growth and inspired by ‘everyone’ going overseas, she decided it was time for her too. Priya had heard about Germany’s new Opportunity Card from a colleague and wasted no time applying for it. In March 2025, she arrived in Berlin with hopes for a fresh start.
A few months later, Sabareesh*, 39, also arrived in the city. He had spent several years working in Thiruvananthapuram’s tech sector. At first, he had wanted to migrate to Canada but he had to change plans after a flare-up in diplomatic tensions between the two nations. That’s when he heard about the Opportunity Card.
Also known as the Chancenkarte, it was a visa introduced in June 2024, ostensibly to ease the shortage of skilled workers in Germany. The country wanted to attract skilled non-EU workers like Priya and Sabareesh. This new migration pathway lowered several hurdles. One could apply without already having a job offer from a German employer or without any proficiency with the German language. In this points-based system, a few years of work experience would be sufficient. Along with that, applicants would have to demonstrate that they could independently bear the expenses of living in Germany through a “blocked account” of nearly 12,000 euros (approximately 13 lakh rupees) in a European bank.
With this visa, one could stay in Germany for up to a year and look for a job, while also working up to twenty hours a week. Months later, neither Priya nor Sabareesh have found full-time employment. Like several others who arrived in Germany under this scheme, the amounts in their “blocked accounts” have dwindled as they move from one low-wage, insecure, and temporary job to another, and count down the days they have left to legally remain in the country.
Migration trap
Soon after their arrival, both Priya and Sabareesh realised that the job market in Germany was not what they had anticipated. Their inability to communicate in German remained an insurmountable hurdle. Unlike what they believed when they had packed their bags, German employers were only hiring those who could demonstrate an advanced proficiency in the language.
Sabareesh applied to over 150 jobs but only received a handful of offers for interviews, which also did not lead to employment. Priya enrolled for an evening course to learn the language, spending her days searching for jobs, navigating bureaucratic hurdles, and seeking affordable shared accommodation. Sabareesh started living in a house with six others, where each of them was paying over 400 euros in rent. He lives a frugal life, well within the 1091 euros that arrive from the blocked account each month.
In the winter of 2025, the coldest in recent years, he worked for about a month, without documentation, as a helper at a kitchen in a large factory outside of Berlin. For each shift of eight hours, he was paid 100 euros (significantly below the legal minimum wage) in cash. The commute alone was brutal. To reach the factory in time for the morning shift, he had to wake up at 4am and travel in the freezing cold. By then, Priya had already completed two months working as a delivery worker for one of the city’s grocery-delivery platforms, cycling through neighbourhoods as the temperatures plummeted, and carrying groceries up staircases.
Both have encountered the ongoing crisis in the German economy, which has been forced to reassess longheld assumptions following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and reckon with job losses in manufacturing and levels of unemployment not seen in ten years. A political crisis also looms. As the electoral strength of the far-right and anti-migration AfD party grows, the Brandmauer (or firewall), an informal pact among mainstream parties to exclude it from power, has become harder to maintain.
Yasmin Ortiga used the term “migration trap” for Filipinos who invested heavily in nursing degrees specifically designed for overseas labour markets but could neither migrate nor find appropriate work at home. Priya and Sabareesh are among thousands of Indians who are experiencing something similar, but after migrating to Germany.
Like them, over 3700 Indians have arrived in Germany through the Opportunity Card route. It is the highest number for any nationality. While the barriers to enter and reside in the country are indeed lowered through this new pathway, finding a job in the medium- to high-wage market that would qualify them to remain in the country for longer has, for many, proved a bridge too far.
“It feels like sometimes you can get jobs even if you are not technically qualified, just so long as you speak German”, says Sabareesh. Educational credentials and work experience from India have often not been valued. Having relocated there at great expense, they have encountered structural barriers to long-term residence in the country. As they wait for a job that would secure their presence, they perform low-wage and insecure jobs to manage their expenses and stave off debt.
Pipeline to low-wage work
High-skilled Indians with specialised degrees and prior work experience are working in forms of undocumented and sub-contracted work in Germany’s food delivery, fast-food, and logistics sectors, where the conditions of work fall quite short of the standards required under German law. In cities like Berlin, young South Asian men on e-bikes, carrying insulated delivery bags are now ubiquitous, and Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, and Telugu can be heard emanating from the kitchens of fast food outlets.
While such jobs may provide a lifeline to new migrants, they also prevent them from growing roots and leave them with little time to look for better jobs, to learn German, and build professional networks. The Opportunity Card may have attracted skilled workers from India to Germany but it has effectively become a recruitment pipeline for low-wage jobs. Many Indians who have arrived in German cities find themselves part of a transient workforce without access to social welfare schemes and not organised into the German unions, and thus ripe for various types of exploitation in the job and housing markets. With few options to avoid further indebtedness, many Indians are left having to make difficult choices.
Sabareesh had raised the 13 lakh rupees he needed for the visa through loans from a public sector bank in India after providing his wife’s gold jewelry and some agricultural land as collateral. The relief he experienced in January 2026 after he received a call to work at an Amazon warehouse was short-lived once the employer realised that the opportunity card did not permit him to work full-time for low wages. He spent much of the month looking for part-time work at fast-food outlets. His wife and three-year-old child remain in Kerala. “My daughter is very sad and sometimes refuses to speak to me when I call. She cannot understand why her father is away.”
Meanwhile, the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz visited India in January 2026 and doubled down on his country’s policy of welcoming “skilled migration” from India. “India has excellently trained young people, which is an opportunity for both sides”, he said. “Therefore, pathways for legal and orderly migration are being paved, through dual vocational training and study programs, targeted visa procedures, and partnerships between universities and companies.”
For Priya, who arrived in Germany through one of these targeted procedures, time is running out. She has only three months left to find “full-time” employment. A “full-time” job contract (where the wage is at least at the stipulated “skilled-worker” level) is one route to continue to remain in the country. Sabareesh, who has five months remaining, is not optimistic. “I am even prepared to pay someone for a job”, he said. He is also speaking to recruitment agencies that promise to coach him for interviews, improve his CV, and spruce up his LinkedIn presence for a fee of 600 euros. Priya, who had already spent half a day at one such training event, did not find it useful. Four months after the training, she is yet to land a skilled job and continues to do grocery delivery work.
Applying for a Masters programme at a university in Germany is another option for them. If Sabareesh gets admitted, he can shift to the student visa, which would allow him to remain in the country for the duration of the course, but would also require him to demonstrate anew his ability to bear the living expenses for that period, either in the form of a fresh “blocked account” or a “part-time” job contract with wages above 1090 euros each month. Even then the student visa is no certain pathway.
Immigration authorities recently increased scrutiny over dubious courses provided by private educational institutions, leaving several Indian students with outstanding loans and without the permission to continue to reside in Germany. The same authorities have also not been able to efficiently process the volume of applications that have come their way.
Towards the end of 2025, appointments with immigration authorities were simply not available for several months. Despite submitting them well before the expiry of the current visa, applications for an extension or a change of visa status did not receive attention for months. Many Indians remained in the country in bureaucratic limbo on the basis of the expired visa and an acknowledgement from the authorities that their application had been received. Some were also given a Fiktionsbescheinigung, a temporary permission to reside in Germany under the terms of the expired visa, while the new application was being considered, a bureaucratic innovation that openly admits to the lack of administrative preparedness. A third option for those who arrived in Germany through the Opportunity Card is to cut their losses and return to India. Having extended themselves so far, they are understandably reluctant. For Sabareesh, it would be “like taking money out of India to spend it here and go back”.
*Names have been changed to protect identity
Aju John is a researcher at the Institute for European Ethnology and the Berlin Institute for Migration at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
Sanam Roohi is a researcher under the "State and Democracy" group at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS), University of Göttingen.