BRUSSELS — Across Europe, a looming skills crisis threatens economic growth, with three-quarters of small and medium-sized enterprises reporting difficulty hiring workers with the right skills. Ageing populations, shrinking workforces and the digital and green transitions are all likely to intensify hiring challenges. Alongside this, the skills crisis is threatening Europe’s ability to make good on policy priorities such as remedying acute housing shortages, building a sufficient care workforce, keeping up with digital innovation and meeting carbon emissions reduction targets. Responding to this crisis will require a multi-pronged approach, including skills training and re-skilling for resident workers as well as improving work conditions. And as a new Migration Policy Institute Europe report out today makes clear, there is a key role for labour migration to play in helping countries fill time-sensitive gaps that lengthier training pipelines cannot. But for labour mobility to fulfill its promise, Europe will need to streamline its highly complex web of labour migration pathways and tackle barriers to entry such as limited opportunities for non-tertiary-educated migrants, inefficient visa processing and lengthy and inaccessible qualification recognition procedures. Greater coordination at the EU level could ease some of these hurdles — yet persuading member states of the merits of a collective approach to labour migration remains challenging. The report, How Can Labour Migration Policies Help Tackle Europe’s Looming Skills Crisis?, analyses the skills shortage landscape and opportunities for EU action on labour migration going forward. The research, carried out as part of the EU-funded Horizon Europe project ‘Global Strategy for Skills, Migration and Development’ (GS4S), makes the case for swift and more coordinated action, identifying which responses should be at the top of the European Union’s to-do list and where EU-level coordination can achieve the most meaningful impact. ‘All too often, EU initiatives have over-promised and under-delivered, or ended up duplicating or overlapping with national efforts’, analysts Kate Hooper, Tesseltje de Lange and Jasmijn Slootjes write. ‘And as politics around immigration harden, the prospects of introducing further directives (e.g., on the admission of low- and middle-skilled workers) or significantly simplifying existing immigration routes seem out of reach for now. But there are nonetheless important steps the bloc could take that can help address skills shortages and demonstrate the added value of a coordinated approach to member states’. Among the solutions, the report recommends policymakers: - Explore a ‘skills and migration omnibus’ that could improve procedures and rights across several EU labour migration directives simultaneously, thereby tackling issues such as inefficient visa processing or inadequate worker protections without reopening each directive for independent reform.
- Refocus EU-backed mobility schemes (which offer temporary placements in Europe for work or training) to gather insights into barriers that prevent uptake of mobility opportunities, such as challenges applying for visas or inefficient matching between employers and workers. Such programmes also offer an opportunity to explore and test out possible policy responses through already-funded EU instruments.
- Promote greater policy coherence between labour migration and other skills investments, both as a way to tackle inefficiencies and to ground labour migration discussions within a broader policy context.
‘With the right focus, timing and engagement, the European Union can shape a migration and skills agenda that is both pragmatic and ambitious’, the authors conclude. Read the report here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/migration-policies-europe-skills-crisis. For more on the GS4S project, visit: https://gs4s.eu/. For all of MPI Europe’s analysis and research, visit: www.mpieurope.org. | 
