مهدی مهدویان صدر
29 یادداشت منتشر شده!Europe Is Closing the Wrong Door
چکیده فارسی
عنوان: اروپا دری را می بندد که نباید ببندد!
سیاست مهاجرتی اتحادیه اروپا چگونه استعدادهایی را می راند که آینده اش به آن ها گره خورده است
چکیده: اتحادیه اروپا با کوچک شدن نیروی کار روبه روست و بر پایه گزارش دراگی، تا سال ۲۰۴۰ نیروی کار این اتحادیه سالانه نزدیک به دو میلیون نفر کاهش خواهد یافت. با این همه، سیاست مهاجرتی بسیاری از کشورهای عضو در سال های اخیر درست برای گروه هایی سخت تر شده که بیشترین نیاز به آن ها وجود دارد: دانشجویان بین المللی، پژوهشگران و متخصصان جوان. این مقاله مروری با تکیه بر داده های یوروستات، سازمان همکاری و توسعه اقتصادی، آژانس پناهندگی اتحادیه اروپا و موسسه پژوهش اشتغال آلمان نشان می دهد که گره اصلی در حجم مهاجرت نیست؛ درخواست های پناهندگی در ۲۰۲۵ حدود یک پنجم کم شده است. گره اصلی در ترکیب و گزینش مهاجران است. در ۲۰۲۴ کمتر از هشتاد هزار کارت آبی اروپا صادر شد که بیش از هفتاد درصد آن سهم آلمان بود، در حالی که مجوزهای کار فصلی بیش از چهل درصد رشد کرد. پیمایش تازه آلمان هم نشان می دهد مهاجران تحصیل کرده و پردرآمد بیش از دیگران به ترک این کشور فکر می کنند و پناهندگان و مهاجران خانوادگی کمتر. نتیجه آنکه فضای سیاسی سخت گیرانه، حتی بی آنکه قانونی به طور مستقیم نخبگان را هدف بگیرد، ترکیب مهارتی جمعیت مهاجر را آرام آرام به زیان توسعه آینده اتحادیه تغییر می دهد. مقاله با پنج پیشنهاد به پایان می رسد، از جدا کردن سیاست جذب استعداد از سیاست پناهندگی تا ثبات قواعد و مسیر کوتاه اقامت دائم برای دانش آموختگان دانشگاه های اروپایی.
کلیدواژه ها: سیاست مهاجرتی اتحادیه اروپا، جذب استعداد، کارت آبی اروپا، دانشجویان بین المللی، مهاجرت نخبگان، توسعه
!Europe Is Closing the Wrong Door
How the EU’s migration politics repels the very people its economy will depend on
In 2024 the European Union issued roughly 78,000 EU Blue Cards, the permit built for highly qualified workers from outside the Union. That was 12 per cent fewer than the year before. In the same year, member states granted almost 274,000 authorisations for seasonal work, a rise of about 43 per cent (Eurostat, 2025). Put those two numbers side by side and you get a fair picture of what Europe’s labour migration system actually rewards.
I have spent much of my career studying how states design and carry out public policy. European migration governance is one of the clearest cases I know of a system producing results that almost nobody would choose on purpose. Brussels talks about a global race for talent, while national capitals, pressed by voters anxious about asylum, keep raising the bar for exactly the people who could win that race for Europe.
Students, researchers and young professionals are the easiest people to discourage, because they are the ones with the most alternatives. What follows is a short review of recent evidence on that mismatch and what it means for the Union’s long-term development.
The arithmetic Europe cannot escape
Start with demography, because everything else follows from it. The Draghi report on European competitiveness projected that by 2040 the EU workforce will be shrinking by close to two million people a year, while the ratio of workers to retirees falls from about three to one to two to one (Draghi, 2024). The Commission’s Joint Research Centre now places the EU population at its historical peak of roughly 450 million, with a slow decline ahead (Joint Research Centre, 2026).
A shrinking workforce can still carry a prosperous society, but only if productivity climbs quickly. That depends on engineers, scientists, physicians, software developers and founders. Europe does not train enough of them at home, and it has never been especially good at attracting them from abroad.
What Europe gets, and what it does not
The joint integration indicators of the OECD and the European Commission show the pattern plainly. Around 35 per cent of immigrants living in the EU have a low level of education, against 20 per cent of the native-born. In the classic settlement countries, where labour migration dominates, immigrants tend to be better educated than the local population (OECD/European Commission, 2023). Europe’s intake has been shaped by guest-worker legacies, family reunification and humanitarian arrivals far more than by deliberate selection on skills.
Permit data point the same way. Of the 27.8 million valid residence permits held by non-EU citizens at the end of 2025, family reunification was the largest single category, at 32.4 per cent (Eurostat, 2026). The Blue Card, by contrast, remains a niche instrument. Germany alone issued 72 per cent of all Blue Cards in 2024, six member states issued fewer than a hundred each, and Sweden, home to one of the continent’s liveliest technology sectors, issued 62 (Eurostat, 2025). Eurostat links part of the 2024 drop to the switch to the revised directive, but even the 2023 peak stayed below 90,000.
In fairness, Europe is not being overwhelmed. Asylum applications in the EU+ fell by 19 per cent in 2025, to about 822,000, and by another 17 per cent in the first half of 2026 (EUAA, 2026a, 2026b). First permits for employment also rose, by 16 per cent in 2025 (Eurostat, 2026). My concern is narrower, and I think more serious. At the top of the skills distribution, where countries genuinely compete, Europe’s policy mix keeps pushing people away, while channels that are not selected on skills make up a large and durable share of the people who stay.
Tightening in the wrong places
Over the past three years several member states have tightened rules that fall hardest on students and skilled professionals.
The Netherlands is the textbook case. In late 2024 the government announced it wanted fewer incoming international students and Dutch as the default language of higher education, and allowed universities to cap their English-taught tracks (Government of the Netherlands, 2024). International enrolments fell for three consecutive years, including a 5 per cent drop in 2024/25. In early 2026 a new coalition reversed the cuts and stopped the scrapping of English-taught programmes (The PIE News, 2026a). Dutch university journalists summed it up by saying the country’s politics changes like the weather (Erasmus Magazine, 2026). The reversal is welcome, yet part of the damage lies in the volatility itself. A student choosing a country commits five or seven years of her life, and rules that flip with every election are a good reason to go somewhere else.
Sweden raised the minimum salary for a work permit to 80 per cent of the national median and then, from June 2026, to 90 per cent, currently about SEK 34,500 a month. The government also sought the power to exclude entire occupations from work permits (Swedish Migration Agency, 2026; Government of Sweden, 2025). There are exemptions for shortage occupations and for some people already in Sweden on study or research permits, but the message to a young specialist, or to a start-up recruiting from abroad, is hard to miss.
Germany, which has done more than most to open its labour market to skilled workers, abolished in October 2025 the three-year fast track to citizenship it had created only a year earlier for exceptionally well-integrated residents (Al Jazeera, 2025). Few people had used it, so the practical effect is small. The signal is not: the one route written explicitly to reward high achievers is the one the new government chose to scrap. Finland, from January 2026, stretched the standard wait for permanent residence from four to six years, keeping a shorter lane only for those who clear income, degree or language thresholds (Finnish Government, 2026).
Then there is the front door. According to the LAGO Collective, Schengen short-stay visa refusal rates for applicants from Ghana, Senegal and Nigeria have run at 40 to 50 per cent, and African applicants lost around 60 million euros in fees for rejected applications in 2024 (CNN, 2025). These are the visas academics use for conferences, entrepreneurs for business meetings and scientists for short research stays. A continent that wants African and Asian talent in its laboratories cannot keep turning the first contact into a lottery.
Who responds to a hostile signal
Here the composition problem stops being an accident and becomes a mechanism. Restrictive signals do not reach all migrants equally. People who arrive through protection or family channels hold legal claims and usually have few alternatives. People who come to study or to work at a high level have options everywhere, from Toronto to Dubai to Singapore.
Germany’s new International Mobility Panel makes this concrete. In a survey of around 50,000 immigrants carried out between December 2024 and April 2025, about 26 per cent said they had considered leaving Germany in the previous twelve months. The tendency was strongest among those who came for work or study, those with higher incomes, recognised qualifications and good English. Refugees and family migrants reported considerably lower intentions to leave (Kosyakova et al., 2025). Yuliya Kosyakova, who heads migration research at the IAB, tied part of this to the tone of national debate, saying that the heated arguments over migration wear down people’s sense of being welcome (Business Standard, 2025).
The implication is uncomfortable. If the most mobile and most productive migrants are the likeliest to leave, and the least mobile are the likeliest to stay, a hardening political climate shifts the skill profile of the migrant population over time, even when no law targets the highly skilled at all. The door closes selectively, and it closes on the wrong people.
Waste makes it worse. Across the EU, 41 per cent of highly educated non-EU nationals work in jobs below their level of qualification, twice the rate among nationals. The same data show that a degree earned in the host country cuts the immigrant overqualification gap by about three quarters (OECD/European Commission, 2023). International students, in other words, are Europe’s most efficient talent pipeline: trained to local standards and already settled in the country and its labour market. Cutting their numbers to relieve a housing shortage or to calm a political mood is an expensive way to save money.
Brussels says the right things
The EU level has not been idle. The revised Blue Card directive lowered salary thresholds. The EU Talent Pool, a platform matching employers with jobseekers outside the Union, finally became law in 2026 as Regulation (EU) 2026/1047, two and a half years after the Commission proposed it. In 2025 the Commission launched a 500 million euro Choose Europe initiative to attract researchers unsettled by funding cuts and visa restrictions in the United States (The PIE News, 2026b), where issuance of F-1 student visas fell by 36 per cent over the summer of 2025 (C&EN, 2026). Rarely has a competitor handed Europe such an opening.
Now look at the scale and the design. Participation in the Talent Pool is voluntary for member states (Regulation (EU) 2026/1047, 2026). France’s national researcher programme announced funding for 46 scientists, 41 of them relocating from American institutions (The PIE News, 2026b). Welcome as they are, these are boutique measures. The heavy political machinery of the past decade went into the Pact on Migration and Asylum, whose core rules began to apply on 12 June 2026 (EUAA, 2026b). The Pact is a dense package of binding regulations; the flagship talent instrument of the same period is an optional matching platform.
What a serious talent policy would look like
None of this requires Europe to weaken its protection obligations. It requires treating talent as a strategic question in its own right, and I would start with five changes.
The first is to separate the politics. Asylum is a legal and humanitarian obligation, while attracting talent is an economic strategy. When both are handled as one “migration problem”, the talent channel ends up paying for anxieties about the other.
The second is stability. Students and skilled workers should be able to rely on the rules in force when they arrived, for the length of their studies and early career. Predictability costs almost nothing and is worth a great deal.
Third, graduation should be a bridge rather than a cliff edge. Anyone who completes a master’s degree or doctorate at a European university should have an EU-wide right to look for work and a short, clear path to permanent residence.
Fourth, recognition and visas need fixing. Faster recognition of foreign qualifications and a dedicated fast track for researchers, students and conference visitors would achieve more than any new slogan.
Finally, governments should measure what matters. Asylum figures come out every month. The same attention belongs to how many international graduates stay, how many skilled migrants leave, and why.
A choice about the future
Europe will not solve its demographic problem through migration alone, and no serious analyst claims it will. But the Union’s long-term prosperity depends on a relatively small number of highly productive people choosing Europe over its competitors, and then staying. At present the continent spends most of its political energy guarding the side of the house where pressure has already eased, while the front door stays stiff, slow and unpredictable for the guests it most needs.
Whether Europe should be open or closed is the wrong question. The useful one is which doors it keeps open, and on current evidence it is closing the wrong one.
References
Al Jazeera. (2025, October 9). Germany repeals little-used fast track citizenship scheme. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/9/germany-repeals-little-used-fast-track-citizenship-scheme
Business Standard. (2025, June 18). Germany needs 500,000 immigrants yearly, but 43% may not stay for long. https://www.business-standard.com/immigration/germany-needs-500-000-immigrants-yearly-but-43-may-not-stay-for-long-125061800655_1.html
C&EN. (2026, May 5). As visa rules tighten, impacts to researchers and US science escalate. Chemical & Engineering News. https://cen.acs.org/policy/us-visa-restriction-stem-research-innovation-patent/104/web/2026/05
CNN. (2025, May 21). Africans lost nearly $70M to denied visa applications to Europe in 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/21/travel/africans-europe-schengen-denied-visas-applications
Draghi, M. (2024). The future of European competitiveness. European Commission. https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-report_en
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Kosyakova, Y., Olbrich, L., Gallegos Torres, K., Hammer, L., Koch, T., & Wagner, S. (2025). Deutschland als Zwischenstation? Rückkehr- und Weiterwanderungsabsichten von Eingewanderten im Lichte neuer Daten des International Mobility Panel of Migrants in Germany (IMPa) (IAB-Forschungsbericht 15/2025; English edition 15/2025en). Institute for Employment Research. https://doku.iab.de/forschungsbericht/2025/fb1525en.pdf
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The PIE News. (2026b, March 5). “We’ve lost a generation of scientists”: US talent turns to France. https://thepienews.com/weve-lost-a-generation-of-scientists-us-talent-turns-to-france/!