Germany Rejects EU Idea to Woo Foreign Workers

BERLIN - Germany on Friday rejected a European Commission plan to encourage legal migration of skilled workers into Europe to ease labour shortages caused by a declining, ageing population.

EU Home Affairs Commissioner Franco Frattini said on Thursday he would present proposals to member states on Oct. 23 aimed at reversing a trend whereby skilled migrants are going to places like the United States and unskilled workers to Europe.

Germany has been wary of EU-wide rules on migration and reluctant to open up its labour market to non-European Union citizens as well as workers from the new EU member states.

Labour Minister and Vice Chancellor Franz Muentefering made it clear that he did not find the idea attractive.

"My initial impression is not a positive one," he told member of the Bundestag, Germany's lower house of parliament.

Economy Minister Michael Glos told the online edition of German magazine Der Spiegel that Germany cannot "massively take in workers simply because we need them at the moment."

He added that there was "a large reserve of unused labour" in Germany, which has an unemployment rate of nearly 9 percent.

Germany announced last month that it would open its doors to engineers from eastern Europe from November to help compensate for a skills shortage in the sector that risks holding back economic growth.

Frattini's plans involve issuing "blue card" residence permits to skilled workers, entitling them to work in a member state for an initial two years and to move into a second member state after two or three years' residence in the first EU state.

Current EU president Portugal will host the first EU-Africa summit in seven years in December, where migration issues will be central.

Asked about Germany's position, a spokesman for the European Commission said the bloc needed to react to demographic decline.

"Immigration is part of the solution to fill the gap," Friso Rooscam Abbing told a regular news conference. "Other solutions are to make labour market more dynamic and reinforce family policy."

Roscam Abbing stressed that even with the "Blue Card" plan, each EU state would still decide how many workers enter its own territory: "The European Commission does not have nor does it want any powers in determining the number of migrants to be admitted."