Germany is undergoing a cultural shift from restrictive immigration regulation towards actively recruiting skilled labour abroad but is struggling to make the country welcoming for foreign workers, German Labour Minister Hubertus Heil said on Wednesday.
Last year, Germany was missing about 600,000 skilled workers, according to the research institution, the German Economic Institute (IW) – a gap that is expected to grow due to an ageing population.
In response, the German coalition government recently pushed a significant liberalisation of its immigration law through parliament to make it easier for foreign nationals to move to the country for work.
“We’ve started the journey, but there is still homework for us to do,” Heil told reporters on Wednesday regarding Germany’s attractiveness for migrants.
The government’s coalition agreement included a clear commitment that Germany is an “immigration country” – a term usually reserved for countries such as the US or Canada.
The country is slowly accepting its role as a target of labour migration, which it has long refused to accept. An official pathway for legal immigration was only created in the early 2000s. Citizenship was reserved for the descendants of German citizens for much of the post-war period, closing the citizenship path for several generations of Southern European migrant workers who came to Germany in the 1960s and 1970s as well as their descendants.
“We asked for workers. We got people instead,” Heil said about Germany’s past dealings with immigration, quoting the Swiss writer Max Frisch.
“We must not make that same mistake again,” the labour minister warned as he emphasised the need to help skilled workers integrate into German society despite cultural barriers.
Nursing staff from Mexico and Brazil who were present pointed to the language barrier as a significant obstacle, which Heil acknowledged was a “competitive disadvantage”.
There are also concerns about openness to ethnically diverse migration among the native population. A study published on Wednesday by the Expert Council on Integration and Migration on German attitudes towards refugees indicated that Germans still tend to be more accepting of European refugees than those from Syria or Nigeria.
As a result, recruitment requires enormous efforts on the part of businesses. The Charité, one of Europe’s largest hospitals, has run social media campaigns in target countries, pays for language classes and organises accommodation and support with Germany’s complex bureaucracy, hospital employees explained.
While the Charité is one of the largest hospitals in Europe, such efforts may be less easily carried out by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that make up a large portion of Germany’s economy. It thus remains open if Germany’s new legal framework will have the desired pull effect on migration.
Heil clarified that the government would not assume responsibility for supporting recruitment efforts beyond the legal framework.
“We can open the door, but businesses have to walk through it,” he said.
(Nick Alipour | EURACTIV.de)
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