Qualified foreign employees to compensate for a massive retirement. This is essentially the option favored in recent days by Germany to deal with the aging of its population and the direct impact on its economy.
Faced with a crisis in the labor market due to nearly 300,000 unreplaced retirements this year, according to the latest estimates, Germany has opted for even greater recruitment of foreign graduates.
During an interview published Friday, January 21 in the economic magazine WirtschaftsWoche, the leader of the Liberal Democratic (FDP) parliamentary group and member of the ruling coalition Christian Dürr revealed the government’s ambitions on this subject. The German state is counting on the immigration of “at least 400,000 foreign skilled workers” each year, he assured. Dürr defined this action as “a modern immigration policy in order to master the aging of the labor market“.
A work permit with points and a better salary
“The shortage of skilled workers is now so severe that it is significantly slowing our economy», justified Christian Dürr, insisting on the need to “change course as quickly as possible and very deeply“.
In order to attract qualified foreign labour, the government coalition in Germany has relied on strong measures, such as increasing the minimum hourly wage. Like New Zealand and Australia, the government led by Olaf Scholz has the ambition to offer a work permit with points for qualified employees who are not European.
With this in mind, the German government also enacted a law on 1er March 2020 aimed at easing access to the labor market for qualified foreign labor by offering the possibility of settling permanently on presentation of a promise of employment or an equivalence of diplomas.