The emergence of the global economy has made us accustomed to goods and services crossing borders. Products that once seemed inextricably Danish, like Royal Copenhagen porcelain, are now produced in Asia and sent back to Denmark for sale. The same kind of mobility is now becoming more and more apparent in the labour market.

Attracting the top global talent in the future will require a more flexible approach to issues like work permits, tax schemes and family integration. In short, it is about easing the barriers to human mobility. And here both Europe as a whole and Denmark in particular face some big challenges in the years ahead if they wish to remain competitive, says one of Europe’s leading researchers in global migration trends.

The key to succeeding
"Europe has invested a lot of time and effort in trying to catch up with the United States in terms of encouraging the high skilled mobility of scientists and highly trained, highly educated people,” says Adrian Favell, a British researcher working at Aarhus University’s Centre for Global and Regional Studies," and ensuring mobility is really the key to succeeding in the global economy looking forward.” Favell works with and writes about pan-European migration trends and global workforce, both in terms of general immigration and issues related to the highly skilled migration.

He says that the focus on internationalisation of the labour market has been an important part of the EU’s Lisbon Agenda since 2000, an agenda which has sought to transform Europe into a knowledge-based economy. "It was a ten year program, but this year they’ve acknowledged that they have not achieved the ideals. The data still shows that America has an extraordinary attraction for scientists and highly trained individuals across all kinds of categories and increasingly particularly from China and India.”

One solution, he says, can be seen in attempts in countries like Germany and Britain at setting up so-called ”green card” type schemes that resemble the H1-B program in the United States. The intent is to help ensure the free movement of labour in the same way there is a free movement of goods, while still making it possible to control less wanted forms of migration.

"It also creates opportunities for students to fall into employment so you can cream off the best – international students who can then go into science and technology,” he says. “And something like that would be particularly relevant for the Aarhus area.”

Opening the labour market
Denmark, he says, could also benefit from a more flexible immigration policy, but adds that the liberal government of recent years has taken a number of steps to open the labour market. Still, Denmark faces specific problems in terms of maintaining a mobile workforce because often people’s qualifications are not recognised and difficulties related to settling in a small country, like language and a strong sense of nationalism, are often hard for outsiders to overcome.  

”The issue of recognising qualifications is a big problem in Denmark because barriers to people finding work when they are very highly qualified are big - not for the person being recruited but most often for the spouse,” he says. ”And the one thing that is always pointed out in research on highly skilled migrants is that you have to deal with the families and the spouses and make them happy. The secret to keeping human mobility is keeping the families happy.”