In 2008, there were 64,000 unfilled job vacancies for engineers alone in only Germany, according to Maria Asenius, Head of Cabinet for the European Commissioner for Home Affairs.
Talking of the necessity for Europe to attract more skilled migrants, Asenius said the loss to Germany's economy due to its deficit in engineers that year was estimated at a staggering euro 6.6 billion.
As many European countries struggle with high unemployment, sluggish economic growth and sovereign debt crises, the issue of migrant workers and labour mobility is becoming more controversial than ever.
Against this backdrop, the European Commission (EC) has proposed a new directive on intra-corporate transferees (ICTs), intended to facilitate the employment of non-EU nationals by multinational corporations in Europe.
The directive provides for a combined visa and work permit, the application procedure for which will be standardised across the 27 member-states, guaranteeing a maximum 30-day processing time.
Three categories of ICTs are covered: managers, specialists and management trainees. People within the first two categories can be employed within the EU for a maximum of three years before having to return home, while trainees would be allowed to stay in Europe for up to a year only.
Once the ICT in question is in Europe, she would also be allowed to move freely within the EU member-states if the company that employs her should require it, on the basis of the first residence permit.
Thus, an Indian working for an MNC in Germany would be able to move to that company's Spanish branch office without having to apply for a fresh work permit or visa, as is currently the case.
According to EC figures, there are about 16,000 ICTs that work in Europe. This number does not include Britain.
But Nasscom, the trade body for India's information technology industry and a vocal proponent of the directive, estimates that even including the UK, the total number of ICTs in Europe would not exceed 30,000.
Argument for
However, facilitating migration for even this limited category of people is proving difficult and controversial.
At a conference organised by the European Policy Centre, a think tank in Brussels, to debate the ICT proposal, Asensius made an impassioned case for Europe's need to enable and encourage legal migration.
From 2013, the working age population of Europe will shrink by 50 million people over the next 50 years, she pointed out, clarifying this figure had been arrived at after taking into account an influx of 58 million immigrants during the same period.
She insisted that migration, if well managed, would create new jobs, add to tax revenues and boost European growth and competitiveness.
For Europe to be able to maintain its generous welfare state, making the EU an attractive labour market was crucial and the ICT directive was one attempt in this direction, she said.
Highly-qualified foreign workers make up only 1.7 per cent of the employed population within the EU, but the equivalent figure for Australia is nearly 10 per cent, over seven per cent in Canada and 3.2 per cent in the US.
The other side
John Monks, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation, remained unconvinced.
Giving voice to a popular sentiment, Monks argued that with average unemployment in the region at around 10 per cent and youth unemployment in countries like Spain as high as 40 per cent, talking about immigration without considering its domestic impact on employment was to live in "political cuckoo land".
Given the situation in Ireland, where economic conditions are so bad that many Irish are contemplating emigrating as they traditionally have in the past, Jan Mulder, a member of the European Parliament, wondered whether an ICT directive was really what Europe needed.
The directive is pending discussion within the European Council and the Parliament. The EC hopes it will be approved by the summer.
But there is no guarantee of this. Perhaps even more problematic is the fact that in the event of the directive being given the green light by all concerned, individual EU member-states would nonetheless retain the right to impose immigration quotas.
In theory, a member-state could even come up with a zero quota policy, so that regardless of the directive, all ICTs could be kept out of delivering services in that country.
While such a scenario may be unlikely, the popular mood in Europe does make it likely that job vacancies in skilled economic sectors will continue to go unfilled because of domestic labour resource deficiencies and hostility to migration.
