“Already today, you cannot imagine the restaurant and hotel sectors, nursing homes and hospitals without foreign workers,” the SPD’s Hannes Walter, deputy chairman of the Bundestag economic committee told POLITICO, pointing out that, at the end of last year, nearly one-in-six of those who pay into Germany’s social insurance systems were foreign nationals.
Walter’s committee colleague, the pro-business Free Democratic Party’s Reinhard Houben, agrees that “there’s just no way around regulated migration” to address the lack of skilled labor.
The problem is particularly acute in Germany’s eastern regions where the AfD performed so strongly at the weekend, according to analysts at Scope Ratings. They estimate that, modeling for slower immigration, Saxony’s working-age population would decline by around 0.5 percent a year through the end of this decade, while Thuringia’s would shrink by 1.1 percent a year, almost three times as fast as the national average.
The AfD, for its part, argues that the country needs to focus more on making life better for its own native talent. Its economic spokesman Leif-Erik Holm told POLITICO that 270,000 skilled workers leave Germany every year. This is a point that most of its opponents and the Bundesbank acknowledge — they just don’t frame it as an alternative to immigration.
“High immigration doesn’t automatically create economic growth,” Holm said. “We have had record immigration numbers for years, but our economy is still shrinking and the skills shortage across all professions hasn’t been reduced.” This, he argued, is “because a large part of that immigration ends up in the social system and not in the labor market.”
Part of Nagel’s, and the Bundesbank’s, problem is that the other, easily identifiable, alternatives to plugging the labor force gap are just not vote-winners. Lengthening the working week goes against a long-standing aspiration of the SPD, in particular (the opinion poll that says Germans would be happy to reduce immigration by working longer hours has yet to be published). Successive governments have dragged their feet over raising the retirement age, which is now set to rise gradually to 67 by 2031.