How do we let in thousands of workers only to discover we don't have enough 'skilled' workers?
What the heck is going on?
The Muslim and African migrants have little European language skills, a majority lack more than a middle school education, and a surprising number are not literate in ANY language.
They aren’t qualified to be workers in an advanced economy. That’s why they came and demanded welfare.
These are two separate topics.
First, you have the Syria/Iraqi crowd which were the bulk (probably sixty percent) that came 2013-to-present. I’ve come across a lot of the Syrians and they’ve got some university background or job-craft skills. I suspect over half of them could easily fit into a job.
Second, you have ‘all others’ (in the range of 40-percent) which includes a heck of a lot of young men from North Africa, with marginal to zero skills for the job market. Based on the statistics from 2016, fewer than 10-percent were getting visas to stay, but they were appealing every single turn-down, and making it hard to deport them (if they didn’t have a passport, their countries were not that eager to cooperate).
Third, the folks who’ve got the visas have a long path to reach job-status. Some of them are frustrated with this path, and eventually will just give up. You can blame the Germans for the path, but it’s their system.
Presently, they will tell you this woeful story of Germany being short (40,000) on teachers. For that, you need a four-year degree. Most German kids in the funnel to attend university....aren’t that interested in teaching.
Same issue with nursing, massive shortage there. They’ve gone and set up career paths and language training for several countries (Philippines, Mexico, etc). A number of the refugees/immigrants could fit into the job role, but you’d spend at least two to three years in training to reach the hiring stage.
All of this leads back to a group of marginal leaders in Berlin who’ve run the immigration doorway like some 5th-grade group of kids handling a candy-store. There was no plan ‘A’ or plan ‘B’. And behind the problems demonstrated, a negative numbers birth-rate which will eventually drop the 82-million population down to around 70-million within the next fifteen years (several studies all lead to that conclusion).