Germany and its economy are running out of domestic workers. For this reason, a new law on the immigration of skilled workers is intended to show more qualified people from all over the world a way here. But while the traffic light coalition is still tinkering with the detailed regulations, the project is heading for a failure in the mills of everyday life: The authorities, above all the municipal immigration offices, are already so overloaded with the tasks related to asylum and refugee migration that they lack the capacity to process even more applications from qualified, particularly desirable specialists.
Britta Beeger
Editor in the economy and responsible for "Die Lounge".
- Follow I follow
Dietrich Creutzburg
Business correspondent in Berlin.
- Follow I follow
This is how it is possible to summarize what administrative practitioners have just described to the members of parliament in a Bundestag hearing on the draft law. "We will all have a problem with being able to include the predicted 65,000 skilled workers plus family members, we calculate about 100,000 people per year, in the administrative procedure," warned Engelhard Mazanke, director of the Berlin State Office for Immigration. This applies to all authorities involved, whether visa offices, employment agencies or immigration offices. "We are already on the verge of dysfunctionality."
"We need 18 million immigrants by 2035"
The traffic light hopes for 65,000 additional skilled workers per year as a result of its legal reform; it is intended to make it easier for those who want to come specifically for qualified work to access residence permits for Germany. In another perspective, however, the same figure seems rather small: According to the Federal Employment Agency, net immigration of 400,000 workers per year would be necessary to compensate for the demographically induced shrinkage of the domestic workforce. With the retirement of the baby boomers, up to about 2035 million people will be lost to the labor market by 7, as the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) repeatedly calculates.
But even this still underestimates the extent of actual immigration that would be needed to close this gap. IAB researcher Enzo Weber now points this out: "We need 18 million immigrants by 2035," he told the F.A.Z., based on an in-depth model calculation. The difference can be explained by the fact that net and gross immigration are two different things: skilled workers also bring families with them, and some turn their backs on Germany later. In order to achieve the demographic target, far more people would have to come: 1.6 million "gross" per year, according to the IAB.
This calculation also includes refugee migration and immigration within the framework of the EU's free movement of workers. However, since the latter is already declining, this also means that the authorities will have to pay the full burden of checking and administrative burden for immigrants from third countries in all the more cases in the future. At present, however, it is questionable whether they are even prepared for the goals of the current Skilled Immigration Act.