Germany’s “Skills Shortage” Scam: Open Borders, Job Losses, And Economic Collapse

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe

The ideology of open external borders has become a core element of Brussels policymaking. When Angela Merkel extended her 2015 invitation to millions, it merely confirmed a policy already long embedded. The claim that this had anything to do with combating the “skills shortage” was always a convenient fiction.

Germany’s economy is now in free fall. Years of overregulation, crushing fiscal burdens, and a self-inflicted energy crisis have scarred the labor market deeply. Since 2019, roughly 700,000 jobs have vanished in the private sector.

State Expansion Hides Collapse

During the same period, the government itself added nearly half a million public sector jobs. That means the real destruction in the productive economy totals around 1.2 million jobs. In 2025 alone, another 100,000 cuts are looming—an alarming verdict on Berlin’s socialist-style, centrally planned economic course. It is also the logical result of believing a subsidy-driven “Green Transition” can substitute for a private economy shaped by capital markets, competition, and innovation.

This decline is structural. Since 2018, productivity has been sliding, year after year. The German growth model has broken. In 2024, €64.5 billion in net direct investment left the country, much of it flowing to the United States, where reindustrialization, deregulation, and energy abundance make the business climate more attractive. Germany, once the world’s export engine, is bleeding capital and know-how.

The Labor Market Turns

Investment inside Germany has stalled. According to official data, the number of job openings in July fell by almost 11 percent compared to a year before, to just 628,000. Facing those positions are millions of unemployed, both Germans and migrants. Two causes stand out: state-run education systematically produces graduates misaligned with market demand, and a lavish welfare state discourages individuals from adapting and seeking productive work.

The true scale of unemployment is obscured. Hundreds of thousands are hidden in short-time work schemes, “training” programs, or statistical loopholes designed to minimize the numbers. The workers exist. And yet, media and politics never tire of repeating the warning of an acute shortage of skilled labor.

Virtually no corporate speech or think-tank study avoids the cliché of missing workers. The Cologne-based Institute for the German Economy warns of a shortage of over 530,000 skilled workers, claiming competitiveness is “dramatically endangered.” The state-owned KfW bank calls it “Germany’s biggest economic risk” and predicts “decades of weak growth” without reform. The official “solution” offered is always the same: open the borders wider, in the hope that somewhere in the tidal wave of migration a fraction of suitable candidates might be found.

The Business Reality

But the practical recruitment of skilled personnel has always been a core responsibility of management. No successful company relies on the state to provide qualified applicants. Instead, they create attractive conditions: competitive salaries, promotion prospects, and opportunities for development. They scout for talent worldwide, targeting the actual pools of expertise. They invest in integration and retention, knowing that skilled workers are in global demand.

Proactive firms go to international trade fairs, use specialized recruiters, and place ads in technical media. They recruit at schools and universities to secure their pipeline. None of this relies on state-run job agencies, symbolic “initiatives,” or the influx of unqualified economic migrants.

That German companies remain largely silent about the failures of open-border policy, just as they remain silent about the absurdities of the Green Transition, reveals the corporatist spirit now binding business and politics.

Two Camps Defend Open Borders

The narrative of “demographics” and “skills shortage” is sustained by two camps. The first are the naïve idealists, clinging to the belief that Germany’s collapsing demographics can be offset by inflows from impoverished regions. They remain blind to the cultural consequences of mass Islamization, ignore the reality of social fragmentation, and cite the United States as a model—ignoring that U.S. immigration in the 19th century was overwhelmingly European, culturally compatible, and forced into assimilation by the absence of a welfare state.

For them, Frontex—the EU’s border guard—is little more than a fig leaf for the abandoned external borders of the Union.

The second camp follows a more calculated political strategy. As in the U.S., mass immigration from impoverished, unstable regions translates into higher vote shares for the Left. They, too, invoke “demographic collapse” and “skills shortages” as justification. With media support, they have succeeded in stigmatizing any criticism of open-border policy as fascist or reactionary.

Outlook and Consequences

While the United States under Donald Trump executed the most radical immigration reversal imaginable—zero tolerance, mass deportations, and enforcement—the European Union drifts toward chaos. The rise of right-wing parties such as AfD in Germany, Fidesz in Hungary, Fratelli d’Italia under Giorgia Meloni, and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France signals public resistance. But despite the surge, there is still no credible reversal in EU migration policy.

As long as symbolic gestures—such as a single deportation flight or a brief border check—are enough to calm the press and stabilize polling for the Left (and its so-called “conservative” allies), Brussels bureaucrats keep a tight grip on policy.

Meanwhile, the real solutions are being pursued not by governments but by companies: Mittelstand firms, retailers, industrial champions, and family-owned businesses. They recruit abroad, invest in training, cooperate with schools and universities, and build the pipelines the state has destroyed with its failed education system. Germany’s labor market is being salvaged not by open-border politics, but by the initiative of the very private sector that politicians continue to undermine.

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About the author: Thomas Kolbe, a German graduate economist, has worked for over 25 years as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.