subject: Does Europe need immigration to strengthen the employment market? [print this page] Does Europe need immigration to strengthen the employment market?
Yes. Over 1.000.000 people retire each year in Europe. Especially in industrial countries like the UK, Germany, France and Italy, there is already a shortage of employees. The birth-rate in these countries is not high enough to cover that loss.
The European Union (EU) already allows all citizens to work any country they want to. However, that will not be enough to cover the needs. Therefore the EU has to think about immigration.
The EU has one big issue. The big countries which require the most employees are not very attractive to potential candidates. Mostly the bureaucracy and cultural difference make it complicated for immigrants. Especially for highly educated employees form Asia.
The German Newspaper Stern wrote an article about Asian immigrants (Headline "Suche Job Aber nicht in Europa"" meaning: Expert needs a job, but not in Europe). The article indicated that Asians have realized that Europe is not their future. Therefore Europe will not get these talents, except they pay them much more than average.
EU leaders have to look for other strategies to compensate the employee gap. One way might be recruiting experts from the United States. The US economy is going done and a lot of high potential candidates have to look for alternative. Due the similar culture, it would be even easier to integrate such candidates.
What is going to happen within the EU?
At first the EU has to coordinate its own education and employment market strategies. There are 27 countries and each has its own strategy. That would be a process that will take at least 5 to 10 years. Furthermore they have to come up with common immigration strategy that will be applied in every EU country. However, the challenge will be, not to harm any of the 27 countries. Due to the different economic structures of the EU countries, the needs for employees are different. Countries like Germany and the UK required a lot of engineers to support the industrial status. Countries like Poland and Greece need expert for agriculture.
The leading European institutes of education assumed, that will happen in the way it is required. The complexity of the EU systems is not that flexible. Therefore they stick to their basic suggestion, to reform the whole EU first.
