GERMANY’S EMOTIVE and divisive integration debate has reached the cabinet table of Chancellor Angela Merkel, leaving her ministers squabbling in public over migration laws.
The coalition government is at odds over whether or not Germany needs more liberal migration rules to address what employers are calling a “drastic” skills shortage.
Two Christian Democrat (CDU) cabinet ministers want to ease regulations – labour minister Ursula von der Leyen and Annette Schavan, minister for education and training. They point to reported skills shortages – 36,000 engineers and 65,000 computer specialists – and want simplified bureaucracy and greater recognition of foreign qualifications.
Joining them is economics minister Rainer Brüderele, from the Free Democrat (FDP) junior coalition partner. He has called for an immigration “points system” along Canadian and Australian lines to prioritise work permits for skilled workers. His ministry has produced figures suggesting that a shortage of skilled workers costs Germany €15 billion annually.
“You can’t turn every early school-leaver into a computer specialist,” said Mr Brüderele, making the case for skilled migrant workers.
But Mr Brüderele and his CDU colleagues were slapped down with aplomb on breakfast television yesterday by the normally mild-mannered interior minister, Thomas de Maizière.
“Everyone just starts chattering away without bothering to check the present regulations,” he fumed. “Our laws are always automatically bad while a points system is declared blessed. Our current system is very immigration-friendly if it is used correctly.”
German employers are of a different view, complaining that there is no central migration agency and that candidates are scared off by a jungle of regulations that vary in each of Germany’s 16 federal states. Many candidates fail to clear a visa hurdle requiring a salary of at least €66,000 while others are put off by a demand that they and their family can communicate in German before arriving.
Employers’ organisations estimate that Germany needs 400,000 skilled workers; worse, they say that most of the people they need already live in Germany but are unable to work in their chosen field because their qualifications are not recognised.
Ms Schavan has promised new legislation to change that, granting the right for foreign qualifications to be checked – not the case until now – and the right to a decision within three months.
She re-opened another front in migration row yesterday with the CDU’s more conservative sister party in Bavaria, the CSU.
Bavarian premier and CSU leader Horst Seehofer has said that priority must be given to employing jobless Germans and that he sees “no need” for more migrants from “alien cultures” to be employed, seen as a swipe against Muslim migrants.
Ms Schavan hit back yesterday, calling the business of attracting foreign workers “a question of skills not religious beliefs”.
Dr Merkel will push for a migration compromise at this morning’s cabinet meeting. Easing the row somewhat will be news that German unemployment has fallen to 7 per cent, an 18-year low.