Labour Mobility Practitioners’ Network meeting 

Some 100 practitioners from all over Europe met in Brussels on November 21 and 22 at the second in-person event of the Labour Mobility Practitioners’ Network, organized by ICMPD. Huub Mudde, MOBILISE Project Director, presented the project focusing on labour market information research and analysis. 

Some of the takeaways of the meeting are that although it is clear that labour migration is important for all of the EU Member States to mitigate labour market shortages, possibilities remain very restrictive and process-wise cumbersome. Positive is that several European countries are experimenting one way or another with new or renewed legal pathways, mainly focussing on a specific economic sector with high labour shortages, like in health and IT.  A point in case are the meetings of the EU Strategic Committee on Immigration, Frontiers and Asylum (SCIFA): while the focus is on security and border control, recently labour migration has been put on the agenda as well.                                                                                                                                                 

In this context, the results of a Lithuanian study are encouraging, because it found out that every Euro spent to match a candidate with an IT company had a 1.7 Euro return on investment. 

Last, food for thought was the explanation of the immigration policy of Canada that selects on the basis of human capital characteristics fit to the Canadian economy and society, instead of specifically focussing on specific labour needs and matches with employers.