Germany Lags in Skilled Immigrants

Regulations hamper the entry of skilled foreign specialists, at an estimated annual cost of $27 billion to the German economy

by Michael Sauga

It's only a tiny metal rod, but for Oscar Escalante-Mendieta it symbolizes his entry into the professional world. Escalante-Mendieta, a recent graduate in electrical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe and an employee of Detecon, a Bonn-based telecommunications company, is in Moscow searching for radio antennas for a Russian network provider. Together with coworkers from Germany, India and the United States, he is poring over circuit diagrams and manuals, pleased, as he says, "that there is so much to learn on my first job."

Escalante-Mendieta's entry into professional life wasn't as pleasant an experience for his employer. While the engineer was settling into his new job in Moscow, Detecon's personnel department was embroiled in a bitter tug-of-war with the German immigration authorities. Because their employee of choice had a Mexican passport, officials used every loophole of German immigration law in an attempt to prevent Detecon from hiring him.

The immigration authorities flatly rejected Detecon's first application for permission to hire the Mexican national. Then they presented an alternative candidate and demanded that the company interview him for the position. Only after Detecon managers told officials that their supposed specialist barely understood English and was even unfamiliar with current cellular phone technologies did the immigration agency give in. It took another three-month marathon of negotiations before Escalante-Mendieta was finally approved.

Detecon's managers breathed a sigh of relief. After all, they still had a further 60-odd skilled positions to fill at the time. But Escalante-Mendieta, for his part, could easily have lived with rejection. "Then I would simply have gone someplace else," he says. After graduation, he says, he received "four lucrative offers from different countries."

The Detecon story is not unusual. Ironically, just as the German economy embarks on its strongest boom in years, the country is on the verge of spoiling its own future by making it difficult for German companies to hire foreign nationals. Every other major industrialized country in the world may be competing for a limited supply of highly skilled specialists, but in Germany -- which currently ranks as the world's leading export nation -- political parties are determined to satisfy the growing demand for highly skilled specialists mainly from a shrinking domestic labor supply.

The German government failed to make any significant changes to the status quo at last week's brainstorming meeting in the eastern German town of Meseberg (more...). And while the administration plans to make a few adjustments to the new immigration act, which recently became law after years of heated debate, the changes are minor.

One of the changes is the coalition government's decision to make it slightly easier for Eastern European engineers and foreign university graduates to move to Germany. But, at the same time, the measures were tied to so many conditions and limitations that they will likely attract very few highly qualified workers to Germany in the future. The Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce (DIHK) called it merely a "small step in the right direction."