Having taken advantage of free movement of workers and railed against overly bureaucratic immigration procedures I am probably not the best person to be speaking about some of these issues.
To clarify my point, I feel very strongly that there is a laziness inside a lot of the IT industry. Back in the day, it was a new industry, so everyone accepted that you would have to train people, or get people who could learn on the job.
Now (perhaps not surprisingly with the growing influx of "respectable managers" from "respectable industries") there is a bizarre tendency to believe that the job market should supply plentiful candidates on tap. And if it doesn't then the only way forward is to recruit workers from around the globe.
To his credit, the guy from the company quoted has set up a local training scheme, but the attitude of himself and Forbes are still quite bizarre:
"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."
Ok, so we're going to outsource the computer specialists, so there's no pool of computer specialists to move up into management skill positions. So we instead expect management types to become specialists? There are issues with that... but that's a diary for another day.
More seriously, if he really thinks he can recruit computer specialists with customer facing management skills from countries which don't speak German (as a generality) then he has some very odd ideas about what skills are required to interact with his customers (and indeed his engineers.)
One thing that's fun is getting a bank account (which you cannot do without a fixed address) and a place to live (which you cannot do without having a bank account).
Oh, and I forgot that to get a bank account you need a National Insurance number, for which they want to know your address.
(And to think that in the Netherlands I just showed up at the bank with my passport and proof of employment ... simpler times.) -----sapere aude
I think that argument is almost as false as the anti-immigration argument about "taking away jobs".
The latter is false because on one hand some immigrants take just these kind of jobs where there is a shortage of locals willing or skilled to do it; on the other hand, immigrants not only increase the workforce but the consumer base too, channeling most of their income back to the host country's economy.
The latter two also reduce the scale of immigrants' role on taxes: on one hand, not all immigrants enter sectors with 'worker shortage', on the other hand, not just tax income but tax spending has to increase too. But specifically regarding retirement funds, the main issue is the change of the rate of immigration. For, immigrants will get old and retire too, increasing the circle in need to be financed. Thus a steady rate of immigration could mean the financing of retired ex-immigrants by new immigrants in first-order approximation; a sudden rise would have a temporary positive effect; a bump would have a positive followed by a negative effect. *Traitor*, n. A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.
