The Skills Gap
	Bonn, Germany
	By URSULA SAUTTER | Bonn

Posted Sunday, June 16, 2002; 11:45 a.m. BST
Dmitri Levitin has come a long way. Six years ago, the then 22-year-old was facing a grim future in his home town, the Ukrainian industrial city of Zaporozhe, where jobs are scarce and badly paid, if they pay at all. In 1996, after earning an electrical engineering degree, he decided to get out. Today, Levitin works as a well-paid systems administrator at Postbank Systems, the IT subsidiary of German banking giant Postbank, in Bonn. "It was the right decision to come to Germany," he says.

Levitin is one of a growing number of immigrants who are filling Germany's ever-widening skills gap. An estimated 750,000 professional posts — some 35,000 in the IT sector alone — urgently need to be filled right now. And people like Levitin, as well as skilled workers from countries like Pakistan, Algeria and Romania, are eager to take those jobs. "The recruitment of qualified foreign personnel was — and is — necessary to secure the competitiveness of German companies," says Helmut E. Klein, of the Cologne-based Institute of the German Economy.

To offset the domestic skilled labor shortage, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's government launched a fast-track program to grant five-year work permits to 20,000 tech experts from non-E.U. countries. Almost 12,000 "green cards" have been issued since the program's start in August of 2000, most of them to Indians and Eastern and Central Europeans. In March, a controversial bill according permanent residency to a limited number of skilled workers was passed by the lower house of parliament. The bill now awaits approval by the German President, Johannes Rau. The new legislation is "a great success" since it helps "establish Germany as a destination for qualified personnel," says Christoph Kannengiesser, manager of the Confederation of Employers' Associations.

While the business community is enthusiastic about the prospect of more skilled workers, many Germans are wary of further opening the country to immigration. With roughly 4 million registered unemployed, about 9.5% of the labor force, the fear of losing jobs to foreigners is too deeply ingrained. Yet, because of increased longevity and declining birthrates across the E.U., Germany needs an annual influx of 600,000 immigrants to sustain its welfare and pension systems. And without immigration, Germany's working-age population will drop from 41 million now to a mere 27.3 million in 2050.

Despite dire statistics like these, a recent Emnid poll found that 76% of those surveyed believed that increased immigration will make unemployment worse. Only 9% thought it would boost economic growth.

	"65% of Danes believe that if immigrants had jobs there would be fewer integration problems" — Gallup, March 2002

In eastern Germany, where unemployment tops the 20% mark in some areas, hostility runs particularly high, scaring away foreign specialists. "I didn't like the atmosphere in the east," says Levitin, who spent his first six months on a language course in Rostock on the Baltic Sea coast. "People were less friendly because of the economic situation. That's why I moved to the western part of the country." Given the hostility, it's not surprising that only 553 green-card holders have so far taken up jobs in the east.

Arguing that many of Germany's 7.3 million foreigners — roughly 9% of the population, one of the highest levels in the E.U. — have failed to adapt to their new environs, the opposition Christian Democrats and its sister party the Christian Social Union are leery of more immigration. "We cannot afford to expand immigration when, in terms of integration, we cannot cope with existing immigration," says Edmund Stoiber, the conservatives' candidate for Chancellor in the September general election. Stoiber opposes the immigration bill currently making its way through parliament, and may kill it if he wins in September, as current opinion polls suggest he might. That's a stance likely to go down well with the roughly half of the voting population who think Germany has too many foreigners already.

Despite the controversy over immigration, Germany is likely to remain attractive to skilled foreigners in search of good wages and benefits. "There is political stability, social security and order," says Levitin, who wants to become a German citizen. For him, living in Germany "is a matter of purely utilitarian thinking": he profits from a good job and a high standard of living, and Germany profits from his contribution to the country's economic growth. Not a bad basis on which to build a lasting relationship

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