AP: Nation & World : Tuesday, August 01, 2000


Germany's first guest worker gets 'green card'
by Sabine Goeb
The Associated Press

NUREMBERG, Germany - As officials handed Indonesian computer expert Harianto
Wijaya the country's first "green card" yesterday, many expressed concern
that anti-foreigner attacks would undermine the initiative by discouraging
highly trained workers from moving to Germany.
There is a worldwide shortage of computer workers, but it is especially
acute in Germany, where immigration laws typically slam the door on foreign
workers.

Without access to a vast global labor pool, German companies feared they
would fall behind - especially compared with their U.S. competitors, which
routinely recruit the best and brightest from overseas, contributing to a
brain drain from developing countries.

Approved last month, the so-called "green card" system - a reference to the
U.S. work permits - was envisioned as a way of pumping fresh blood into
Germany's information-technology field, which has an estimated 75,000
unfilled openings for lack of qualified domestic candidates.
Wijaya, 25, the first to get a five-year work permit in the new program,
appears just the sort of candidate Germany is seeking.
The graduate of the North Rhine-Westphalia Technical School had a perfect
grade-point average and has a job with Aixcom GmbH, a software firm in
Aachen.

"This is a wonderful day for Germany," said Bernhard Jagoda, president of
the German Labor Office. "Germany is an excellent place for foreign skilled
workers."

Wijaya seconded the enthusiasm, saying he was "totally happy" to stay on in
Germany. But others worried the system could flop.

Last week, a bomb exploded in a Duesseldorf train station, injuring 10
people, all recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union, six of them
Jewish. Authorities are trying to determine whether the attack was motivated
by anti-Semitic or anti-foreigner sentiment.

But after other recent acts of anti-foreign violence, officials pledged a
tougher response to an increasingly violent neo-Nazi scene.
"The meager interest in the green cards is the best indicator that Germany
is not an attractive workplace for foreigners," warned Bernhard Rohleder,
chairman of Bitcom, an industry association of high-tech companies, in an
interview with the Financial Times Deutschland.

Despite the initial buzz, only about 5,400 serious applicants have
registered for 20,000 green cards, and in the industrialized western state
of Hesse, there were only 25 applications for 1,271 openings.
"I was a little disappointed," the state's labor administrator Wolfgang
Forell told the German daily Handelsblatt. "I expected more."
Attracting foreign computer experts to Germany also is difficult because the
country lags behind the United States in incentives such as stock options, a
fringe benefit sought-after technicians have come to expect. And it has the
disadvantage of slapping professionals with weighty taxes.

Despite successfully pushing the green-card program through parliament, some
German companies complain now that the workers who already have applied for
green cards are underqualified.

Deutsche Telekom criticized the program for attracting few acceptable
candidates, and IBM has requested only one green card - for a Tunisian
information-technology specialist, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung.

Under the new rules, workers who come to Germany will be given a five-year
work permit after they prove they have completed a degree in a related field
or have a guarantee of making at least $48,000 in annual salary. They will
be allowed to bring family members, who also will receive work permits.