Blue Card for Skilled and Willing to Work in the EU

The worker shortage in the common market has prompted the European Parliament to propose a solution to the European Commission.

It’s called Blue Card (named after the color of the EU flag) and is based on a highly successful American immigration program for highly educated professionals that has attracted people around the world to the U.S. labor market for the last two decades.

According to the Blue Card draft, an employee from outside of the EU would be granted a permanent resident’s card automatically after getting a job offer with pay at least three times higher than the minimum wage of the country. He or she could bring along immediate family and after two years seek work throughout the EU.

Another condition, however, is that the job vacancy could not be filled by an EU citizen.

The new law would harmonize immigration rules in the 27 countries of the EU and attract the skilled people from developing countries who now usually choose jobs in the U.S. and Canada because of their liberal immigration plans.

The draft filed by the European Parliament does not go as far as the North American programs. And it is highly possible that some countries ? most probably Great Britain, Ireland and Denmark ? will oppose the Blue Card project.

The Polish job market already has suffered from what can be called a “brain drain” to the UK, Germany and Holland, where salaries are much higher. In the information technology and engineering sectors, Polish wages are now close to the European average as companies fight for workers.

And Polish entrepreneurs, as well as their colleagues from other EU countries, will warmly welcome any law that might bring skilled computer specialists from Eastern and Southern Asia or Africa.

For those regions, the intensification of the global fight for employees may have very bad consequences.