The German parliament has passed legislation to open up new opportunities for job seekers from countries outside the EU and for many refugees who are already in the country.
However, conservative lawmakers are up in arms.
The new immigration law reform is intended to attract more non-EU citizens to migrate to Germany for employment and has finally been approved by the Bundestag.
“This draft law secures prosperity in Germany, It’s unacceptable that you have to fill in 17 different applications to bring a new care worker into the country,” ” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) said on June 23 as she presented the government’s plan in the chamber in the morning, though she added that it would only work if the bureaucratic hurdles were dismantled during its implementation.
The largest opposition group, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) combination, which leans conservative, supported several of the government’s proposals while criticizing the idea of lowering the requirements for hiring foreign workers. Plans to lessen the level of German language proficiency required, according to Andrea Lindholz of the CSU, would simply promote unskilled labor.
Lindholz argued that the new law would do nothing to address what she called the main problem: Bureaucratic bottlenecks such as over-long procedures at foreign consulates.
She also said that the plans to open opportunities for asylum-seekers who were already in the county ran the risk of “turning the asylum process into a kind of state-financed job-seeking opportunity in Germany.”
Norbert Kleinwächter of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD), delivered a fiery rebuttal to the draft law, suggesting that the government’s plan would turn Germany into a “junk country” (Ramschland).
“What you have put together in a 100-page draft law could be summed up in one sentence,” he said. “Everyone gets in, but no one gets thrown out.”
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