Germany Aims to Attract 400,000 Foreign Workers Annually

The new German government plans to attract 400,000 qualified workers from abroad each year to address both demographic imbalances and labor shortages in key sectors that threaten to disrupt the pandemic recovery, Reuters reports.

“The shortage of skilled workers is now so serious that it is drastically slowing down our economy,” said Christian Dürr, the leader of the Free Democrats, in an interview with the WirtschaftsWoche business magazine. “We can only solve the problem of an aging workforce through modern immigration policy… We must quickly reach the target of 400,000 qualified workers from abroad,” Dürr added.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats, Dürr's Liberals, and the Greens have agreed on measures such as a points system for professionals from non-EU countries and raising the national minimum wage to 12 euros per hour to make working in Germany more attractive.

A German economic institute focused on employers estimates that the labor force will decline by more than 300,000 this year as more older workers retire than the number of young workers entering the labor market. This gap is expected to rise to more than 650,000 by 2029, leading to a shortage of about 5 million working-age people by 2030.

Last year, the number of working Germans reached about 45 million despite the coronavirus pandemic. The decline in the workforce, following decades of low birth rates and uneven migration, poses a demographic bomb for Germany's public pension system.