[See "German visa offer fails to tempt India's IT experts" covering the underwhelming response to this plan. "I would much rather go to the US." is the problem.]

2-23-2000

HANOVER, Germany (AP) -- Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder outlined
his vision Wednesday for moving Germany to the forefront of the
global high-tech world by opening borders to foreign high-tech
workers and hooking up more Germans to the Internet.
``Our claim is that our country can take a place at the pinnacle
of international competition in the information age,'' Schroeder
said at the opening ceremony of CeBIT, a weeklong computer and
technology fair beginning Thursday that features 7,800 companies
from 60 countries. ``Our goal is ambitious. I am certain we will
succeed.''
Saying the country could profit from the experience of
well-trained technical workers from overseas, Schroeder said the
German government was prepared to create a work visa system similar
to that in the United States.
An estimated 350,000 new positions will be created for newly
trained specialists by the year 2002, as Germany continues to turn
away from traditional heavy industries to high-tech services. But
German tech companies complain they already have 75,000 open jobs
that they can't fill for lack of qualified workers.
Businesses have recently been demanding Germany implement a
U.S.-style system that would let at least 30,000 qualified foreign
workers take some of those spots -- a major departure from the
current system of reserving those jobs for unemployed Germans.
Schroeder said Wednesday that he would push for such a system,
but only if industry took an active part in retraining the
unemployed for jobs in the high-tech sector. He did not say how
many spots would be opened for qualified foreigners, or provide
other details about how it would work.
Germany's unemployment rate has been stuck at around 10 percent,
and a cornerstone of Schroeder's 1998 election victory was his
promise to lower that rate.
But opening the borders to high-tech workers could also give the
sluggish economy a shot in the arm. It is currently mounting a
fragile rebound from a meager growth rate of just 1.4 percent last
year.
Germany's slow reception of the Internet has put it nearly two
years behind the United States in online technology, but Schroeder
said Germany is poised to catch up by tapping the boom in European
mobile communications.
This year, sales in computer technology and mobile phones that
access the Internet in Germany $110 billion, but is expected to
shoot up to $150 billion in the next five years.
Tapping that growth, Schroeder also outlined plans to make
Germans more Internet savvy by boosting the percentage of German
households connected to the Internet from a paltry 14 percent today
to nearly 40 percent by 2005.
The plan would also ensure that every German school has an
Internet connection by the end of next year, and would aim to
double the number of German multimedia companies in the same time.
Cost is big deterrent to surfing the Web, because Germans pay
the highest telephone bills in Europe and also have to pay
minute-by-minute fees for even local calls to their access
providers, unlike in the United States.