Germany: Berlin transposes Directive 2009/50 on the “European Blue Card” six months late

Ideological jam, from the Green Card to the Blue Card.  Six months after the deadline to transpose Directive 2009/50/EC (see our dispatch No.  090671), Germany finally decided to transpose the text into national law.  It was slow in doing so because of lasting political and ideological disagreements between the majority parties – the Christian Democratic Party (CDU), the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) and the Liberal Party (FDP).  While the latter has been pushing for the introduction of a selection system allowing highly-skilled workers from outside the EU to come to Germany for a long, the CSU and part of the CDU have been rejecting such a system.  For years, both parties’ representatives felt that, during massive unemployment periods, this measure wasn’t good for the elections.  Powerful German unions were on the same page.  In 2000, when the Schröder administration created the “German green card” to bring 30,000 high-skilled computer specialists to Germany, Christian democrat leader Jürgen Rüttgers sparked off a long-lasting controversy with a xenophobic whiff, saying that it was better to “put our children in front of the computer rather than Indian computer specialists.”  That same year, as 4.3 million German people were without a job, Jürgen Rüttgers, Director of the “Employment Policy” department at the Confederation of German Trade Unions, explained that his organization would tolerate the green card as a temporary solution, judging that “Germany has enough resources to train its own specialists” but agreeing that, in the meantime, “gaps need to be filled.”