BRAIN DRAIN – BRAIN GAIN: Germany 13 and EU citizenship(with the exception of a period of transi­tion with restricted access to the labour market for citizens from the new EU member states). As will be seen in the next section, Germany has become an attractive destination country for EU citizens from countries with lower wages and poorer working conditions. These internal factors – that is, changes in the political discourse on(high skilled) immigrants and economic growth throughout the EU economic crisis – together with two main external factors have led to a change in the immigration status of Germany: from non-immigration country, Germany is becoming the main destination country for EU immigrants. The first external factor is the EU enlarge­ment to central and eastern Europe. The second external factor is the recent EU financial and economic crisis experi­enced by southern EU countries, which in turn led to a sud­den labour emigration from these countries. In the first part of this study, we will discuss in more detail the rapid changes faced by Germany in recent years regarding the immigration of EU citizens and intra-EU emigration of Germans. Next, we will present the available statistics on the educational level of EU immigrants residing in Germany. Because general national surveys do not enable a precise assessment of the profile of recent EU immigrants according to their educational level due to the low sample size, we will complement the statistical analysis with a case study of a high skilled profession that suffers from labour shortages, namely medical doctors. This case study aims at providing insights into the existence of a brain gain and drain for high skilled professions facing labour shortages. The last part of this chapter analyses the positions of the main political, economic and civil society actors regard­ing high-qualified EU immigration and the issue of intra-EU brain drain and gain. 2.1 EVOLUTION OF IMMIGRATION AND EMIGRATION FLOWS TO AND FROM GERMANY IN RECENT YEARS In this section, we will present the evolution of intra-EU migration from and to Germany since 2007. Figure 1 presents EU immigration flows to Germany in 2007 and 2013. These are the most recent statistics available from the German Sta­tistical Federal Office(Statistisches Bundesamt 2009, 2015). In contrast to the Eurostat statistics that measure immigration by counting immigrants who spend at least one year abroad, the statistics provided by the Statistisches Bundesamt refer to the number of registrations of non-German citizens in German registration offices. These statistics do not consider a minimum length of stay and might contain several entries for the same person, if the person registered several times during the same year. These varying definitions of immigration explain the different statistics on immigrant flows provided by Eurostat(used in the main study) and the Statistisches Bundesamt. As can be seen, the number of non-German EU citizens who immigrated to Germany doubled in 2013 compared with 2007. Moreover, if we consider the net EU migration rate in Germany – by subtracting the number of non-German citizens who left Germany for another EU country from the number of non-German EU immigrants to Germany – the difference between non-German EU immigration(from the EU to Germany) and emigration(from Germany to the EU) flows in 2013 were about+300,000 compared with+73,000 in 2007(statistics not shown). With regard to EU citizens, Germany is a large net receiver country, because the number of non-German EU citizens immigrating largely outperforms the number of non-German EU citizens leaving Germany. Furthermore, the net EU migration rate in 2013 increased by more than four times compared with 2007. EU immigration flow has thus become a highly significant demographic phe­nomenon in Germany in recent years. This boom in the EU immigrant flow to Germany, however, is not the result of an overall increase of immigrants regardless of region of origin. Indeed(and as can be seen in Figure 1), there are large re­gional differences in the immigration flow changes between 2007 and 2013. Hence, the immigration flow from western and Scandinavian EU countries remained relatively stable between 2007 and 2013. By contrast, immigration flows from southern, central and eastern EU countries to Germany have grown substantially in recent years(+211 per cent for southern EU countries,+207 per cent for Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia and+60 per cent for the EU member states that acceded in 2004). While the increase in immigration from southern EU countries more than doubled between 2007 and 2013, immigration from central and eastern EU countries remains the most important in absolute terms. This huge increase in EU immigration flow between 2007 and 2013 is due mainly to two recent developments within the EU. The first is the financial and economic crisis that severely hit some southern EU countries from 2007 onwards. The economic crisis in turn has led to a growing unemployment rate that has affected in particular the younger labour force in these countries(Eurostat 2015a). Unfavourable labour market conditions, such as high unemployment rates, constitute high push emigration factors(factors that motivate someone to leave their country of origin). By contrast, the German labour market and economy remained relatively unaffected by the EU financial and economic crisis: Germany is the only OECD country whose unemployment rate among both the immi­grant and non-immigrant population fell from 2008 to 2012 (Liebig 2013), making the German labour market attractive to EU workers seeking to improve their career prospects. Germany has become a popular destination for labour migration within the EU, attracting the largest number of non-national EU citizens in 2012(OECD 2014: 23). Moreover, besides the United Kingdom, Germany is the second most likely destination country within the EU for southern Euro­pean immigrants: in 2011 Germany received 28 per cent of the immigration flow from southern Europe, while 32 per cent of these new immigrants entered the United Kingdom (Liebig 2013). The second recent development was the open­ing of the German labour market in 2011 to workers from the 2004 new EU member states. The 2004 EU enlargement to central and eastern EU countries did not automatically give citizens from the new member states full access to the EU labour market. Indeed, with the exception of a few EU countries(the United Kingdom, Ireland and Sweden) all other EU member states – including Germany – applied transitional measures to restrict the right of freedom of movement for workers. The declared justification for these restrictions was