Germany planning to re-look into immigration law :
The law targets foreign professionals from all over the world and will apply to those already living in Germany as well as prospective newcomers. Citizens from fellow European Union nations are already overwhelmingly allowed to work freely in all of the bloc’s 27 member nations. “There is a young generation out there today that naturally plans its careers as taking place on different continents,” Schavan said, implying that Germany no longer wants to lose out on international high achievers, who often prefer the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom over Germany.
“We now have a lack of 400,000 engineers, master craftsmen and skilled workers,” Hans Heinrich Driftmann of the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce DIHK said recently. “We’re already losing one percent of our economic growth and in the future this shortage will only get worse.” His group has repeatedly warned that an aging population is going to sharpen Germany’s labor problem in coming years and that companies need to be more open-minded toward immigrants.
Without that, it says Germany could end up with a labor shortage of five million people within the next 15 years, which would also mean a lack of millions of people paying taxes or investing in the country’s pension funds. Germany’s booming economy is especially aggravated by a shortage of engineers, there were some 80,600 open jobs in the profession last month, according to the Association of German Engineers . Physicians are also desperately needed. A doctors association, Marburger Bund, says the country lacks 12,000 physicians at hospitals and 3,000 general practitioners.
However, for some like the Palestinian immigrant Shakib Amawi, the labor law reforms may have come too late. Amawi holds a degree in civil engineering from a college in Kuwait, where he also worked for seven years. When he came to Germany in 1992, he was not allowed to seek work as a civil engineer and took a lesser job as a machine operator in a bread factory near Duesseldorf. That company closed last year and now the 50-year-old is seeking work again. Although his degree may finally be recognized, he fears it may be too late. “I’ve sent out so many applications again,” Amawi told the AP in a telephone interview. “But now everybody tells me that I’m too old and it’s been too long since I worked as an engineer.”
Source: AP
