On 27 November 2015, EMN National Contact Point for Ireland in cooperation with the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation organised in Dublin the EMN National Conference entitled Making labour migration work: Identifying labour shortages and attracting migrant workers as part of the solution. The conference focused on comparison of current approaches and formulation of possible new approaches in relation to identifying EU labour market shortages.
The speaker of the first panel, Jean-Christophe Dumont from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), pointed out how outdated the standard labour migration scheme is while being based on the concepts of supply versus demand, low versus high skilled jobs and permanent versus temporary employment. Current situation in which the job positions are commonly filled through specific job vacancies demands a more flexible and broader approach. Among the latest trends belongs migration within a Member State instead of a migration from one Member State to another, an increase of labour migrants with tertiary education as well as higher demand of some Member States for labour force which is not necessarily highly qualified. For an effective labour migration management there is a need to adjust to the situation or to have instruments in order to harmonise relations in the area of labour market such as state versus employer or employer versus employee.
The following presentations compared approaches in identification of the labour market shortages in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Jennifer C. Smith from the Warwick University introduced the work of the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), an independent advisory body to the British Government which deals with labour market research. MAC prepares a Shortage Occupation List (SOL) through which third country nationals can apply for jobs. The other possibility is an intra-corporate transfer. Due to the fact that Great Britain has a point-based immigration system, the requirement to reach the limit of the minimum salary is required to be met in order to enter the labour market (so called Tier 2 Salary Threshold) as well as the condition that the job position is listed in the SOL. Jasmina Behan from SOLAS, the Irish state agency with responsibility for assisting the job seekers, described the National Skills Database. Based on this database, the analysis of the labour market demand and supply is carried out while taking into account also intra-corporate transfers, required education or possible retraining. The information is used not just for the advice to the government which uses it for the migration management but also for the formation of policies in other areas such as education.
The second panel dealt with attracting labour migrants at the global level. Fiona Flood from the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation spoke about the current economic situation in Ireland. In the area of labour migration Ireland faces various challenges such as continuously changing migration trends, problems with competitiveness or brain drain. Mark Remond from the American Chamber of Commerce in Ireland focused in his presentation on the American-Irish relations in the area of entrepreneurship and introduced the initiative of the American Chamber of Commerce and IDA Ireland entitled World of Talent in Ireland which was introduced in 2015 with the aim to demonstrate the career opportunities and attracting new talents to Ireland. At the end of the panel, Iván Martín from the Migration Policy Institute provided a statistical overview demonstrating that Europe is losing in the international competition for talents especially in terms of the level of skills and specialization of migrants. Europe is becoming less attractive for the labour migrants than the United States, Australia, Canada or the Gulf countries. Martín highlighted the brain drain from Europe due to e.g. low income or insufficient provision of the free movement. The most important European tool for attracting talents is the EU Blue Card while the revision of the “EU Blue Card Directive” was marked as the first step towards the new EU policy in the area of legal migration. The introduction of the new legal migration package is foreseen by the European Commission for March 2016. Among drawbacks of the current Blue Card instrument can be considered the requirement of the salary threshold equal to 1.5 times the average annual salary of a country and the limited rights for family members.