Germany’s new coalition government intends to bring in 400,000 competent foreign workers per year to address a demographic imbalance as well as labour shortages in critical industries that might jeopardise the country’s recovery from the coronavirus outbreak.
“The shortage of talented people has grown to the point that it is significantly hampering our economy,” Christian Duerr, parliamentary leader of the co-governing Free Democrats (FDP), told business journal WirtschaftsWoche.
A contemporary immigration policy is the only way to control the problem of an ageing workforce… “We need to get to 400,000 skilled employees from other countries as soon as feasible,” Duerr remarked.
To make working in Germany more appealing, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, Duerr’s libertarian FDP, and the environmentalist Greens agreed in their coalition deal on measures such as a points system for specialists from outside the European Union and raising the national minimum wage to 12 euros ($13.60) per hour.
