A recent article in the Wall Street Journal caught my attention in the past day. The article starts off on a shaky start, making it appear that it’s concerned about immigration laws, but the title is what caught my eye. Europe is in trouble in a way that America is not.

Image how the vacuum works; foreign immigrants come to America (where the population outnumbers the jobs) and overflow the market with illegal immigrants who are willing to do the work in the informal and formal markets where Americans find such jobs “beneath” them. Europe on the other hand is experiencing the opposite problem. Instead of having too many immigrants, they have too few and their population isn’t booming. In fact the average worker in EU countries is at all time high as they grow older and fewer youth arrive to replace them.

Take for instance the statistics for Germany. Over 3.8 million German workers are currently on the formal labor market, yet somehow the country is experiencing a major labor shortage that has caused 600,000 formal market jobs to be left unfilled. Engineers are in short-order, making up 48,000 of the missing workers. According to the Wall Street Journal, this led to a total of $4.6 billion dollar loss in market revenue for Germany in the past year.

Germany is the world’s largest exporter and therefore holds a special place in the global market but the loss of workers and the growing age of the population places their contribution to the global market in a questionable state. The informal market is nearly as shaky considering that German workers are ignoring over 80,000 unskilled jobs. So what options are left?

Foreign labor is certainly not in a recess in America but for Germany to hold on to its spot as the largest exporter in the world it will need to lower its restrictions. The EU made the free movement of labor a fundamental right but Germany waved that until 2009. In the meantime the country will have to make due and deal with the loss of a large part of the market share as well billions in lost revenue.

The people who could possibly fill these jobs, or as American’s would term it “steal” these jobs, are up in the air. The global market certainly has a large number of displaced and roaming workers. Britain for instance has taken into its bosom over 600,000 immigrants from Eastern Europe in order to fill a hole in the labor pool.

I personally like to think that this is a sign that American’s have an open window in countries experiencing a shortage such as Germany. American degrees hold a lot of weight and the generation that is currently completing their undergraduate degree have the worst case of wanderlust ever recorded. Perhaps the labor shortage is a sign that an international move of labor is coming, but for that to happen, Americans would have to become expatriates.

Expatriates are becoming a growing contribution to the global labor market, including Americans that leave the US in sight of a way of life that doesn’t include 40 hour work week and only two weeks of paid vacation.

EU unemployment, as the Wall Street Journal reports, is at 7.1% (the lowest its been in 15 years). At the same time the European work class is also growing older and most countries population growth isn’t anywhere near as comparable to the US. Therefore new jobs will only continue to be more and more available and outside, foreign workers are the only ones there to fill the gap. Expatriates would be well learned to take advantage of such a shortage, before the rest of the world takes notice.

• Previous Entry: Constructive Graffiti
• Next Entry: Giuliani Wants Accountability. I Want New York Back.