Talent Migration Governance and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Comparing Germany and Singapore

ABSTRACT

We compare Germany and Singapore to see how their approaches toward talent migration governance have evolved in the last decade and whether and how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected these developments. Building on the Highly-Skilled Immigration Index (HSII), our discussions show Germany becoming very welcoming of high-skilled labor migrants, and Singapore becoming increasingly selective in which labor migrants it admits into the City State. Our findings reveal that the COVID-19 pandemic has not changed the direction of policies in Germany and Singapore, but it has affected talent migration rates.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• Germany
• highly-skilled
• migration
• Singapore
• talent

Acknowledgment

We want to thank Anna Triandafyllidou for providing excellent comments to our initial draft, and the three anonymous reviewers who pushed us to improve our argument.

Notes

1 There is also a permit for IT specialists with practical occupational experience (Federal Government, 2021c), but we leave it out for the following analysis since we focus on the main routes to Germany. It is also unclear how many of these permits have been issued so far.

2 We exclude EntrePass in our analyses because this is not the main route through which most high-skilled migrants enter Singapore, and the statistics for the numbers of EntrePass issued are not publicly available.