FRIEDRICH-EBERT-STIFTUNG 12 2 GERMANY: A MAJOR INTRA-EU BRAIN GAIN COUNTRY? OVERVIEW OF AVAILABLE STATISTICS AND THE POSITIONS OF KEY ACTORS Céline Teney and Pascal Siemsen, University of Bremen Summary –– Germany has newly acquired the status of the country that benefits the most from intra-EU immigration: intra-EU immigration flows to Germany doubled between 2007 and 2013. The main factors behind this intra-EU immigration growth are EU enlargement to the central and eastern European countries, to­gether with the current economic crisis, which has hit southern EU countries particularly hard. According to the most recent statistics, among all EU immigrants to Germany in the past five years, the proportion of highly qualified workers has been as high as the proportion of highly qualified Germans among the domestic population. –– Analysis of one of the three highly skilled professions characterised by the most acute labour shortage in Europe – medical doctors – shows that the number of non-German EU doctors practicing in Germany has more than doubled since 2005, which points to an intra-EU brain gain for this profession. However, the brain gain status of Germany for this profession becomes more uncertain once German medical doc­tors leaving Germany are also taken into account: the number of non-German medical doctors registering with the German chamber of medical doctors has outperformed the number of German medical doctors leaving Germany only since 2011. –– With few exceptions, most key actors in German society support the increase in qualified immigration to Germany as a way of coping with the predicted demographic changes and to ensure economic growth and prosperity in the long run. However, the largest trade union(DGB) is the only actor so far that has acknowledged the potential emerging economic imbalances for the sending(EU and non-EU) countries experiencing the brain drain of which Germany might become a major beneficiary. INTRODUCTION Over the past ten years, patterns of migration have changed dramatically in Germany. Until recently, Germany was consid­ered a non-immigration country by its leading political figures (see, for instance, the famous speech of Helmut Kohl in 1991 in which he stated that»Germany is not an immigration country«, Kohl, 1991) and imposed strict restrictions on im­migration and citizenship of non-EU nationals compared with its western European neighbours(Koopmans, Michalowski and Waibel 2012). This profile as an EU member state with restrictive and conservative immigration policies has evolved radically over the past few years, however: first, national opinion-formers have started to acknowledge Germany’s need for additional labour in order to cope with the demo­graphic changes due to falling birth rates coupled with the ageing of the German population. The current workforce in Germany is not large enough to meet the needs of the national economy, which has continued to grow – with only a brief interruption – despite the recent EU economic and financial crisis. Moreover, due to the decreasing workforce, the current level of prosperity – including the level of pen­sions for the growing population of retirees – cannot be maintained in the long run without a strong increase in the labour force. This situation led the EU to introduce the EU Blue Card in 2012, which aims to facilitate the process of obtaining a work visa for highly skilled non-EU immigrants. The programme has not met with the expected success, however, as a much lower number of highly qualified non-EU immigrants than planned have applied for a work visa within this programme. Nevertheless, it highlights the significant changes in the discourse and strategy of Germany’s govern­ing elites concerning the need for immigrants, particularly high skilled ones. This change in the political discourse that positions Germany as a»welcoming country for(high skilled) immigrants« has certainly contributed to the improvement of Germany’s image as destination country abroad. Second, while Germany has retained some sovereignty to decide on the immigration criteria and conditions of non-EU nationals, Germany’s national borders – similar to the national borders of every other EU member state – are open to EU citizens without restrictions, thanks to free movement rights