Germany to ‘make extra effort’ to woo Indian workers, students

New Delhi: Germany will make “extra effort” to attract more skilled workers and students from India following the signing of a bilateral migration and mobility agreement last week, German ambassador Philipp Ackermann said on Wednesday.

Ackermann acknowledged that Germany currently takes “too much time”— about four or five months—to process student visa applications and said this was due to both the sheer number of applications and the need to weed out fraudulent applications. He added that authorities are focused on cutting the time needed.

External affairs minister S Jaishankar and his German counterpart Annalena Baerbock signed the migration and mobility agreement after a meeting in New Delhi on 5 December.

The pact will facilitate Indian and German citizens to study, conduct research and work in both countries.

Ackermann noted that there will always be a need for skilled workers in Germany “across the board, be it cooks or nurses or IT experts”.

“What we’ll see in the coming years is an outreach towards India in order to get Indians and their families coming to Germany and joining our workforce, and we need them.”

He added, “One of the inflation drivers in Germany is the lack of skilled workers and labour, and therefore we will make an extra effort. Our agreement on mobility basically contains this idea that we will be opening up for legal migration to Indians citizens. We have a good diaspora of Indians in Germany, who have a very good reputation.”

As of December 2021, Germany was home to 160,000 Indian nationals and 43,000 Indian-origin people, and Ackermann said this number is set to grow.

Germany also has more than 34,000 Indian students and there has been an “exponential growth” in this area, the envoy said.

“Once you finish your studies in Germany, you have a year to find a job. Actually, my experience is that you don’t even need a month to find a job right now, and then they can stay. We are very interested to having [the students],” he said.

The bureaucratic process for processing student visas takes “too much time right now” and authorities have been overwhelmed by the number of applications. “We get about 1,000 applications a week and you should know that about 85% to 90% of the applications are very good...but 10% are fraud and we need to try to eliminate as much as possible these frauds,” he said.