Germany: Deportations despite labor shortage?

Andrea and Tino Wohlmacher should actually pop the champagne corks now. They have just scored their first small victory in the German bureaucratic jungle of asylum applications, skilled worker immigration and deportations. But the operators of the care center for dementia patients in Wilstedt near Bremen have a lot of work at the end of the year and no time to celebrate. 48 people are treated at this center in Germany.

The ten assistant nurses from Colombia who are employed there will not be deported, they are allowed to stay for the time being, with the leave enabled initially because of two or three years of professional training. Andrea Wohlmacher tells DW: "It's like a stone has been removed from our hearts."

From asylum to employment?

The story of the ten Colombians is a good lesson to understand how difficult it is still for Germany to attract and retain urgently needed workers and at the same time to clearly separate asylum and employment migration. The unqualified South Americans initially applied for asylum, but it was rejected. Therefore, they could not move into the skilled immigration process through a so-called "lane change" on the legal side. The threatening scenario: All Colombians had to leave Germany - which essentially meant that the center had to be closed due to lack of staff.

Andrea Wohlmacher was convinced. "I think we are the prime example of necessary migration. And this is not just for skilled workers. We have had a shortage of workers in Germany, especially in the nursing sector, for decades." According to the German Nursing Council, there is already a shortage of around 115,000 professional nursing staff in full-time nursing positions. The market is empty, many hospitals, care centers for the elderly can only survive with staff from abroad.

The case goes to the Minister of Health, Lauterbach

When their ten employees are threatened with deportation, the two health center managers turn to the public. They write an open letter to eight politicians, and even TV crews appear in Wilstedt. 83,782 people signed a petition to the federal government. Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach even accepted it personally.

The case sparked debate across Germany: How can well-integrated people who pay taxes and are day and night for the needy have to leave the country? But there is another side to the coin: What kind of signal does Germany send abroad if rejected asylum seekers without proper training can stay in the country? The final decision now rests with the Special Commission of the Land of Lower Saxony.

Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach promised to do everything possible that was allowed by law. "If we didn't have foreign nursing staff, we wouldn't be able to provide healthcare to the same extent in Germany anymore," Lauterbach said, adding that a signal must be sent: "Foreign nursing staff are more than welcome here, because we depend on them and we have had very good experiences with them".

Reduction of requests for asylum, increase in employment

Andrea Wohlmacher is sure that without public attention and talks with politics, the fear of short-term deportation would still exist. Joachim Stamp, the federal government's special representative for migration deals for nearly two years, is the one who must ensure that skilled immigration to Germany takes place in an orderly manner, not through a possibly hopeless asylum application. Stamp has even recently held talks in the Colombian capital Bogota these days. "We want to reduce irregular migration and enable better management of migration for employment reasons. I have also made it clear publicly in the Colombian media that the path to the German labor market does not go through the asylum law, but only through immigration of qualified workers". Stamp told DW.

Currently, 14,000 Colombians living in Germany are employed with social security contributions. There are also 3,500 undergraduates and postgraduates and around 500 employed researchers. With a comprehensive migration partnership with countries such as Colombia, but also Georgia, Uzbekistan, Morocco and Kenya, Germany wants to promote regular migration for employment reasons and reduce the number of asylum applications that do not have a chance to be recognized by citizens. of these countries. /DW (A2 Televizion)