BERLIN - With almost 5 million people out of work, Germany's labor market might seem a manager's dream when it comes to filling jobs — easy pickings from a sea of desperate applicants. Not so for entrepreneur Martin Hubschneider when he needs top talent for his software firm in Karlsruhe, Germany.

He's got to look far and wide, searching for the skills needed to develop the complex customer relations programs his CAS Software AG sells.

"For a year now, it has been harder to find employees in the information technology field, particularly highly qualified ones," Hubschneider said.

Bosses like Hubschneider are confronting a paradox: In a country with unemployment of over 10 percent, there is a deepening shortage of skilled workers in some industries. Rich European nations like Germany and France have been cracking down on immigration in reaction to concerns about joblessness, but many economists say western Europe needs precisely the opposite approach: Attracting foreign labor to offset a graying population.

Over the next decade and beyond, experts say, more overseas workers will be needed to keep companies like Hubschneider's competitive, prop up shaky pension systems, and fuel economic growth.

Many leading economists and politicians say Germany, France, Britain and other western European countries could use a points system like the kind used by Canada and Australia, where prospective immigrants get graded on meeting skills criteria. In June, France passed a law that stiffens rules for immigrants but makes it easier for those with special skills to get in.

But the notion of a points system has been slow to catch on in Europe and faces strong resistance from center-left parties.

The eastern expansion of the
European Union has often been cited as a way to ease the labor crunch. But here, too, there is a problem: Most of the new members that joined in 2004 also have low birth rates. Poland's for example is 1.3 children per woman — far lower than the 2.1 needed to maintain steady population.

Fresh supplies of labor, it seems, may have to come from farther afield — the EU's near neighbors such as Ukraine or Turkey, which have ambitions of joining the bloc, or from China or India.

BITKOM, Germany's high-tech association, reported in its annual survey that 33.1 percent of member companies reported having difficulty recruiting, up from 22.6 percent last year and 14.9 percent in 2004.

"From 2020 the loss to the labor force will reach 500,000 to 600,000 people a year," said Holger Bonin, a specialist in labor migration at the Institute for the Future of Work in Study of Labor in Bonn. "That's the equivalent of a middling big city."

Some economists argue that a points system would actually promote social equality in the host nation.

Jakob von Weizsaecker, a former
World Bank economist at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels, argued recently in a policy paper that attracting high-skilled immigrants depresses wages in the professional sector, reducing the overall income gap. In contrast, he said, a bias toward low-skill immigrants causes wages to fall toward the bottom of the economic scale, increasing wealth inequalities.

Moreover, favoring workers with higher skills boosts the chances of existing immigrants to find jobs in the low-income sectors hardest hit by unemployment, reducing the risk of an ethnic underclass, von Weizsaecker argued.

But for now, many companies are looking at homegrown solutions. Hubschneider's CAS Software, which makes software that helps companies and call centers keep track of their customers, is working with the nearby University of Karlsruhe to develop good candidates among both foreigners and Germans.

"We need very well educated people, who understand the culture well," said Hubschneider. The company needs computer specialists who also have the management skills to run projects and interact with customers, and "fewer pure programmers, because that is work that one can offshore."

Much of Germany's concern about immigration focuses not on the looming demographic crisis, but on better integrating the children of the so-called gastarbeiter, or guest workers — migrants who came to Germany from the 1950s to the 1970s from Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia but most of all from Turkey. Many of them — and their children and grandchildren — have failed to integrate completely into German society, causing handwringing among German politicians about parallel societies.

But those immigrants were less skilled, not the high-skilled workers needed by the service and information-based economies of the future. Scholars say high-skilled workers, with better prospects and language skills, are easier to integrate.

The points system was considered in the most recent revision of Germany's immigration laws, which took effect on Jan. 1, 2005, but was dropped during debates. French Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy — a top candidate to succeed Jacques Chirac in presidential elections next year — favors a points system for France. British lawmakers have also been discussing the idea.

Economist Thomas Straubhaar said Germany will only lose from waiting. Germany must compete with other countries, such as the U.S. or Australia, which have established immigration streams. Highly educated people from India and the former Soviet Union are heading for the U.S. rather than to Germany.

Muddling through "will not cause problems for the next decade. But you can't lock the new system in after 10 years and think that they will just flow in," said Straubhaar, who is president of the prestigious Hamburg Institute of International Economics.

"You can't just turn on the switch and think everyone will come," he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060811/...mporting_labor

Maybe I will move to Germany!