The local government in Hanover, Germany will be reserving a third of newly-advertised jobs exclusively for migrants in order to increase the proportion of people with foreign backgrounds working for the city.
The Hanover integration committee recently set a goal to significantly increase the number of migration-background employees working for the city and presented a draft resolution stating that “[i]n order to achieve this goal within five years, 30 per cent of all vacancies must be filled by people with a migration background. Accordingly, the target figure for all new hires is 30 per cent.”
The city is also looking to create a public campaign directed at young people from migration backgrounds in order to advertise both training and studying opportunities in Hanover to them.
There will also be a “Day of Diversity” in local schools and prizes for migrant companies operating in the city, the newspaper Junge Freiheit reports.
Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, a member of the German federal parliament for the Free Democrats (FDP), criticised the idea of saving a third of all city jobs for migrants, arguing that the policy may violate the German constitution.
“What happens to the other 2/3? Are they reserved for organic Germans? The whole thing is evidently unconstitutional if I understand our Basic Law correctly,” Lambsdorff said on Twitter.
Over the last several years, several German politicians and bureaucrats have claimed that Germany needs more migrants to fill gaps in the labour force, but very few have advocated quotas specifically for migrants due to the fact they are actually more likely to be unemployed.
Detlef Scheele, the Chairman of the German Board of the Federal Employment Agency, claimed last year that Germany needs at least 400,000 new migrants per year in order to fill jobs, as Germany was losing as many as 150,000 people of working age per year from the labour force.
“You can stand up and say: We don’t want foreigners. But that doesn’t work,” he insisted. “The fact is: Germany is running out of workers.”
The comments were echoed earlier this year by German Economy and Climate Protection Minister Robert Habeck, who called for more immigration to fill job openings.
However, facing the looming winter energy crisis, Habeck also claimed that German businesses may have to simply shut down operations due to the surging cost of energy, saying: “I can imagine that certain industries will simply stop producing for the time being.”
Presumably this would leave the country with a large number of imported foreign workers out of a job and relying on welfare.