How to facilitate a smooth ride to Germany?

In the forthcoming months, I will provide, as far as confidentiality allows, a series of little insights into the efforts we at the Bundesagentur für Arbeit are currently making to help streamlining the immigration process for skilled workers seeking admission to Germany. Perhaps one or two pieces might be interesting for the immigration management community... Let's get into it!

Time-consuming, bureaucratic and frustrating visa application procedures are a major case in point for critics of the current immigration system for Germany. More specifically, the systematic labour market admission process, as is organized now, requires:

(i) submitting a ?declaration of working conditions“ form by the designated employer of the migrant, a form containing basic information about working hours, salary, side payments and benefits, and the like, to the centralized services branch (ZAV) of the Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit, BA), and

(ii)?manual verification and cross-checking of the contents of said form by officers of the employers’ services from the respective regional employment agency, using external data like wage statistics as well as on-site employer interviews and file analyses.

Whenever this check produces negative (or even only ambiguous) results, the visa application will be flatly rejected without any means of remonstration for the employer and very much to the detriment of the migrant, who finds themself stranded with very little means of remedy.

That procedure is obviously not very smart. The crux is this: German immigration laws demand that working conditions for visa applicants ?be not less favourable compared to domestic workers“. And it's our job at BA to ensure this. Fair enough to protect migrants from exploitation and avoid wage dumping, one might say. But why does this have to lead to a bureaucratic nightmare, wasting resources and time, prone to mistakes (and these do happen) and delays? Well, obviously it is a relic from the past, when streamlining immigration processes was no priority and employment agencies were generally regarded as labour market watchdogs. So making employers to humbly submit a written application for admission was regarded as a justified manifestation of Government authority, and still seems to be. Read Heinrich Mann′s works for reference…

I dare not advocate for a thorough reform of the existing laws in the current political climate. But could possibly something be done by automation? That I think is feasible, when we at BA would choose (and be permitted by German data protection czars) to simply use existing data in our databases, as we have already started to do. Let′s dig into our data treasures…

As it happens, BA is responsible, among other tasks, for the German Labour market statistics. This is quite unique for a federal institution, given that German Constitution assigns statistical responsibility a a rule to the States (or L?nder). But as a result, all national employment (and unemployment) data form a vast federal database. This contains the social security data of literally every single employer and employee ever having been or presently being subject to mandatory social security contributions since 1975. The primary use case of this data base is computing the social security claims for pensioners from the contributions paid during employment. But as a side effect, a multitude of additional attributes is being collected for statistical purposes.

The aforementioned wage statistic ("salary atlas") our officers use is actually being drawn from this very data base. Using aggregated data, however, may be misleading for individual decisions. For example, statistical granularity of classifications might not be appropriate to assess if working conditions really match local market conditions for specific jobs, confusing officers trying to interpret these data. This often leads to faulty decisions by officers taking these statistics at face value. However, when one drills down on micro data, it is quite easy to assess how - for a specific employer or local market - working conditions really look like AND on the basis of the existing social security accounts if these are being met in the case of a visa application. The required data for opening, running, confirming (annually) and closing ?a social security account are practically identical to the contents of the ?declaration of working conditions“ I mentioned above!

By using these data, I claim that all necessary checks for working conditions pre, at and after entry, could be automated without any additional manual work for most of cases. So, long story short: I suggest to do exactly that and skip the ?declaration of working conditions“ and the following steps altogether. Which may lead to a (preliminary) approval decision in real time. We are working on a proof of concept as I write this. So: Back to the drawing board!