Days before German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s trip to India last week, the labor ministry unveiled 30 measures under a new plan to lower hurdles for Indians to pursue their careers in Europe’s biggest economy, expanding on a migration and mobility partnership agreement signed in 2022.
Visa applications will be digitalized to speed up the process, and the recognition of professional qualifications will be made more efficient. German organizations will also offer targeted advisory services to Indian students.
It is hoped that these moves will underpin the government’s aim of raising the number of visa offered annually to skilled Indians from the roughly 20,000 now.
“We have to destroy red tape so that we can find the right people for Germany,” Labor Minister Hubertus Heil said when he unveiled “Skilled Labor Strategy India.”
More broadly, the Goethe Institute German cultural associations in India will add classes and staff to expand language courses. Additionally, they will open new schools outside of India’s metropolises. German organizations also will hold more job fairs in India.
Such efforts will be accompanied by an intensive social media outreach to attract Indian talent.
Like other Western nations, Germany faces an aging population. Government researchers project that Germany needs to recruit 400,000 foreign workers each year, a gap that its fellow European Union bloc members can’t help to fill, as they confront similar demographic issues.
India has the world’s largest population, but Germany isn’t the only country courting its young, educated public. The U.K. also is encouraging Indian skilled workers to come and fill labor gaps.
“The Skilled Labor Strategy India has positively surprised me, since it is the first of its kind [that Germany has offered to a particular country] that really takes the foreign talent by the hand with active support, rather than focusing on exchanges between companies and government units,” said Ahu Celik, a Frankfurt-based lawyer at Roedl & Partner, which focuses on talent migration.
“The German government is willing to inject a lot of manpower for matchmaking, and it is highly likely that it will lead to more Indian talent migrating to Germany,” Celik said.
Talent migration from India to Germany already was surging, with about 50,000 Indians obtaining visas for work and study and to join families last year. That figure represents a 40% increase over 2019, before the COVID pandemic froze cross-border mobility.
Indians also are making an impact in the academic sector, representing the largest cohort of international students in Germany at 42,600 last year.
Experts say the path often is paved by those who studied at German universities and formed networks to help others come over. Celik said many connections also are made through the LinkedIn social media site.
The German Economic Institute published a recent study that showed Indians form a core group of inventors in Germany. It said that in 2020, the proportion of inventors with an Indian given name accounted for 6.8% of the total number of inventors with foreign names.
The migration of Indian science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) specialists will help Germany to innovate, economists said.
The study also found that Indians earned the highest monthly median wage, at 5,227 euros ($5,650), among full-time employees in Germany.
“The main reason for this is that around a third of full-time employed Indians work in academic STEM professions,” said Axel Pluennecke, head of the institute’s Cluster for Education, Innovation and Migration. “We are expecting a decline in Germany’s own positive educational trend in the coming years through factors such as the deteriorating performance of German students in mathematics and declining numbers of new students in STEM subjects.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, right, met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on Oct. 25. The two discussed defense and security collaboration. © ReutersGurpreet Kaur, an IT sales consultant who migrated from Mumbai to Frankfurt in 2020, said Germany offers a healthy work-life balance, good working conditions and fair salaries, as well as a strong social security system. Unlike Asia, Germany also provides opportunities for free or low-cost higher education, a big draw for those moving with families.
But language still poses a big barrier to integration, she said.
“Although English is used as a working language in a lot of multinational companies, German is absolutely essential for social integration and certain jobs, especially in the public sector and where there is customer interaction,” she said.
Kaur, who is learning German at an advanced level, said the expanding tech community can help new migrants.
“The transition is generally positive for those in tech or specialized fields, and there are growing Indian communities, particularly in cities like Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt,” she said.
Germany’s far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party opposes such labor strategies. It wants the government to plug labor gaps with technology and impose a family policy that encourages Germans to have more babies.
For now, analysts say that Indians are fairly insulated from such discrimination, given that they tend to live in major cities where there already are high numbers of migrants.
source : asia.nikkei