HANOI — Had he never left Vietnam, Van Bau Nguyen would still be living with his parents. Even at 24, he would still share a bed with his brother and help his mother in the family’s Hanoi workshop until late at night. “In Vietnam, it’s hard to find a well-paying job,” Bau says, explaining what prompted him to leave.
So, he moved 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) away to Germany.
Bau’s mother told him that young people were needed in Europe, and an agency had assured him they could find him a training position in Germany. “I got to choose the state,” Bau recalls. “I liked Bavaria.”
He had read online that the standard of living there was high. He also had a choice between nursing care or working in a hotel. “I dreamed of traveling, so I picked the hotel,” he says.
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It sounds too smooth to be true: A young man in Hanoi chooses his training in Germany like a pair of shoes or a new jacket. In a country he has never been to before. He didn’t even have a job interview before leaving. “Looking back, that was, of course, naïve,” Bau admits now.
What made it all the more risky was the price he had to pay even before leaving. The agency charged €7,500 for the placement, visa, and flight. For another €11,300, they arranged a language course and accommodation in Saxony-Anhalt for several months. Even by German standards, that’s a lot of money. In Vietnam, where the average wage is around €230 a month, it’s a fortune.
Encouraged by Hanoi
Yet, these fees are common. Die Zeit spoke to several Vietnamese immigrants who, like Bau, came to Germany to train in hotels or restaurants. They all mentioned paying large sums —some as much as €20,000— for the chance at a better life, based on a promise that’s not always guaranteed.
This is the new migration industry.
German training placements have become a business in itself in Vietnam. Private agents make a healthy living out of bringing young people to Germany for large sums of money.
“This is the new migration industry,” says Berlin-based social and cultural anthropologist Birgitt Röttger-Rössler.
She and her colleagues have investigated the conditions under which Vietnamese people come to Germany. “Families take out large loans to pay these agencies, which pushes many into serious debt.”
Young people, in turn, are put under pressure — so much so that they sometimes have to accept precarious working conditions. This is what unions report, especially in the hotel and catering industry. “In the worst case, this can lead to exploitation,” says Volkmar Wolf, Federal Youth Secretary at the Food, Beverages and Catering Union (NGG).
Nevertheless, more and more Vietnamese are taking this route. Between 2014 and 2016, only 800 people came from Vietnam for apprenticeships. Between 2021 and 2023, that number jumped to 6,000, according to data from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. One reason is that half of Vietnam’s population is under 30, leading to intense competition for few jobs. The government in Hanoi encourages people to seek work abroad, believing those who earn good money will send funds back to their families in Vietnam.
Decades of savings
Germany benefits from this, as companies here lack young workers. According to the Federal Education Report, more than 70,000 apprenticeships remained unfilled in 2023; a number that has doubled in the past decade. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Federal Minister of Labor Hubertus Heil traveled to Vietnam in January. In Hanoi, they signed an agreement to recruit even more workers from the country.
But under what conditions? At whose expense?
The International Labour Organization’s recommendation is clear: it is not the young people who should pay for recruitment, but the companies that employ them. In practice, however, this happens almost exclusively through government recruitment programs.
But there are only a few such initiatives, and their places are limited. Between 2021 and 2023, only 305 nursing trainees came to the country through the flagship project “Triple Win” of the Federal Employment Agency and the German Society for International Cooperation.
“The state cannot take on the recruitment alone,” says Stefanie Scharf, who heads the department for flight and migration at the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. “That would be too expensive, too time-consuming.” The federal government can only use targeted programs to show “how recruitment should ideally work.”
Private agencies, sensing good business, are stepping in. If you search on Google for a provider of apprenticeships in Germany in Vietnamese, you will get over 100 million hits. They are usually paid by those whose hopes are highest: the parents.
We gave him his inheritance early.
Bau’s family in Hanoi is neither rich nor poor; they describe themselves as middle class. Their apartment is in a narrow alley that leads off an eight-lane road: two bedrooms, a kitchen-living room, a room for the house altar. Inside, you can hear the noise of cars and the honking of mopeds everywhere. Bau’s parents run a small workshop on the ground floor where they make stamps. They hardly ever have a free weekend.
His mother once worked in Germany herself, as one of thousands of Vietnamese guest workers in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany). That was in the late 1980s, in a spinning mill near Leipzig. When the Wall fell, she was paid a severance package, high enough to set up her own business in Hanoi. That’s why Bau was also going to go to Germany. His mother says: “We gave him his inheritance earlier.” Decades of savings.
Agents or scammers?
You could say that this is an investment in Bau’s future. Just like parents elsewhere spend a lot of money on studying abroad. Still, too large a part of it ends up with the agencies.
You can visit a few of them in Hanoi. Some have several branches, others just a small office. Almost all of them have large, colorful pictures of Germany on the wall: the Brandenburg Gate, the Frankfurt skyline, in unnaturally bright colors. “Hotel manager, restaurant manager, tiler or butcher,” one employee lists the apprenticeships for which young people are needed in Germany. Even during training, you can earn 900 euros or more a month.
But nobody tells you how much of that goes to taxes, or what the cost of living in Germany. Bau says: “I had no idea about all that before I left.”
I felt like cheap labor.
The hotel where he started his apprenticeship in August 2020 is in Bad Windsheim, a spa town in Middle Franconia: 50 rooms, four stars. A small fountain bubbles in front of the entrance. “In the past, applications for apprenticeships were piling up,” says hotel manager Oliver Späth. “Today we are happy if we get any at all.” So, a hotelier friend recommended him an agent for apprentices from Vietnam.
While the hotel manager emphasizes that he makes a lot of effort for the trainees from abroad, Bau tells how uncomfortable he felt.
“I was always scolded.” During the early shift, he had to bring fresh bread rolls and the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper to the boss’s family home. During the pandemic, he had to clean their holiday apartments. Bau says: “I felt like cheap labor.”
Späth cannot understand this. He says he pays according to the collective agreement, which is something not everyone in the industry does.
In addition, Bau’s training took place during the pandemic: “It was simply impossible for the apprenticeship to go as planned.” But they both share the same feeling: disappointment. And yet, what Bau reports is similar to what other trainees from Vietnam, who will only be referred to by their first names, have to say.
Video of a Vietnamese influencer visiting German cities — Source: DeutschFlex – Tiếng Đức Di Động
Mold, frauds and no day off
Hieu, 25, came to Germany to do an apprenticeship as a chef in a holiday resort near Leipzig. “I still owe my uncle 15,000 euros for that.” That’s why he didn’t say anything about the long hours he worked in the hotel kitchen. And also about the mold in the apartment that the boss had given to him and his girlfriend, another trainee from Vietnam. Hieu shows photos of walls covered in black spots.
Whenever someone was not working, I had to step in, even if it was my day off.
Vy, 24, did an apprenticeship as a hotel manager near Düsseldorf: “I lived in a hotel. Whenever someone was not working, I had to step in, even if it was my day off.”
Tran, 33, originally came to Germany to study but struggled with the language. Fearing he would lose his residence permit, he paid an agency 5,000 euros to get a training position. Note that, on German soil, it is illegal to charge for such a thing. As a trainee chef, Tran worked for some time in a kitchen where there were no fully trained chefs. He taught himself most of the skills using books and online courses.
“Young people from abroad are completely at the mercy of their employers,” says Ari Dedic, who looks after junior staff at the NGG union in Bavaria. In the hotel and catering industry, many companies ignore collective agreements and won’t even comply with legal minimum standards.
The Federal Ministry of Labor says that it would discuss aspects of fair migration in talks with third countries. At the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, Stefanie Scharf is a little more specific: “We are currently talking to the Vietnamese Ministry of Labor about fair recruitment.” This includes the question of how the market for recruitment agencies could be regulated. A certification body could be created. “The most important thing is that people who want to move to Germany have access to honest and comprehensive information,” says Scharf.
Fear of shame
Will that work? Wolfgang Nickel doesn’t think so. In Großpaschleben, Saxony-Anhalt, he and his wife run a trout farm with a restaurant and guest rooms. With trouble finding workers, he now recruits them abroad. In Jakarta, and, for a while in the past, in Vietnam. First for his own company, then for others. He pays for local language schools. But he expects the agencies to comply with German Law and not to demand any money from the young people or their families.
New criminal structures are emerging.
He has since withdrawn from Vietnam: “I could hardly find an agency from Vietnam that doesn’t take money from the apprentices.”
This whole system might also start showing its face in Germany. New criminal structures are emerging, says anthropologist Röttger-Rössler. For example, several Vietnamese told Die Zeit about a fellow countryman who had collected money from them, such as health insurance contributions for the duration of a language course. But the money never reached the health insurance company.
Van Bau Nguyen was lucky in the end: he switched to another hotel and completed his apprenticeship. Today, he works as a receptionist in Würzburg. But many others are not doing well, according to statistics from the Federal Institute for Vocational Training: 534 Vietnamese apprentices graduated in 2022, but 709 dropped out of their training in the same year.
What happens to them? “Many end up working illegally,” says Röttger-Rössler. They end up moonlighting in a nail salon or a Vietnamese restaurant. Very few want to go back home: “The shame would be too big, he explains. “The families have invested so much money into this.”
