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Today ALDE Members Cecilia Wikström (Folkpartiet, Sweden), Jan Mulder (VVD, the Netherlands) and Nadja Hirsch (FDP, Germany) held a seminar on labour migration, ”Facing the paradox: ensuring skills and talents for European economic growth”. Faced with long and complicated procedures to hire employees in the EU, companies decide not to establish themselves in Europe and re-direct their development strategy towards other economies (US, Australia, Brazil, India, China, etc.) leaving Europe ironically struggling to find the right skilled labour.

Cecilia Wikström, EP rapporteur on the new Directive to improve EU attractiveness and accessibility for foreign researchers and talents, said: ”Migration is not only, as many EU countries think, a matter of security but it is also an instrument to boost economic growth and competitiveness and a contribution to make social systems more sustainable, especially for those countries confronted with an ageing population”.

”It is incredible that out of fear or political prejudice, many Member States are depriving their companies of the skilled labour they need. It is even more incredible that they don’t conceive a system to encourage third country residents who studied or were trained in their territory to access their labour market. The battle for talents has its consequences”.

Despite all the efforts to bring down unemployment and match skills in the domestic labour force, Europe-based international companies and SMEs in fact face huge problems to hire the people they need. Not only highly educated people, but also people with very specific skills like technicians, workers in the agriculture sector or care sector and specialised workers are in short supply. Some of the principal barriers to labour migration addressed at the hearing include visa costs and visa waiting time which differs considerably between EU Member States, the lack of harmonisation between labour migration laws, and the limits of a sectoral approach which categorizes and selects the migrants and creates administrative burden.

”Despite the Stockholm programme, whereby Member States agreed to develop a common immigration policy, the EU still faces a high degree of fragmentation and limits, both due to Member States”, said Jan Mulder listing some of few existing proposals, such as the Blue Card for skilled workers, common rules for intra-corporate transfers, seasonal workers, students and researchers.

”If Europe wants to remain one of the best and most competitive economies in the world, it must change its course now and put into place a common European migration policy that will ensure it avails itself of the right skills and talents to meet today’s and tomorrow’s needs”, he concluded.

For more information, please contact:

Linda Aziz, press officer of Cecilia Wikström

linda.aziz@ep.europa.eu

+32 486 94 76 82