The idea of granting a limited (five-year) residence permit to professionals from third countries in the name of boosting the German economy was voiced by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder at the international computer trade fair CeBIT in spring 2000. During the validity of the regulation "On the Work Permit for Highly Qualified Foreign Specialists in the Field of Information and Communication Technologies," signed by former Minister of Labor Walter Riester, 14,600 computer specialists, programmers, and other "specialists of the 21st century" from India, Pakistan, Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, and the Baltic states entered Germany and found employment.
The very first "green card" was issued to Indonesian Harianto Vijaya, a graduate of the informatics faculty at Aachen University, who received a position at the mobile communications company Aixcom. This "card" immediately became an honorary exhibit in Bonn's Haus der Geschichte, where, they say, it is displayed under glass and shown daily to schoolchildren on excursions. And Vijaya is now preparing to go home. The others will follow him, having devoted all recent years to the great cause of the struggle for Germany's economic prosperity and its competitiveness on the world market: no one intends to extend their expiring residence permits.
At the time, Aixcom director Martin Steppler compared the hiring of Harianto Vijaya to winning the lottery, speaking of the opportunity to implement a million-dollar project in the field of wireless communication thanks to the new employee's knowledge. Over the past four years, according to statistics from the Federal Labor Office, which in the meantime has become an agency, the employment of foreign specialists created on average two new jobs per specialist — jobs for local residents. At the same time, every seventh green card holder is currently unemployed. But the main thing is that they are all deprived of any career prospects: if earlier the "green card" was considered a "successful transitional model for regulating entry until the adoption of the immigration law" (quotation from a statement by former Bundestag President Rita Süssmuth, 2003), now there is practically no hope for foreign specialists to obtain a more definite status.
Having failed twice in the Bundestag, the same number of times in the Bundesrat, and also ostracized by the Federal Constitutional Court, the law will eventually be adopted, but in a more than "castrated" form, without any hint of priority right of entry into Germany for highly qualified personnel from outside the EU, which was so dreamed about five years ago. "The German government is simply not ready to regulate the admission of foreign specialists... If such a legislative regulation were possible, the decision would not have been postponed until the last minute — that's just not German." This phrase by Harianto Vijaya has already gone around all German media.
The idea of boosting the German economy never became the cornerstone of discussions on the immigration law. So learning German, building houses, and sending children to German schools simply makes no sense for foreign computer specialists. While they are young, they will pack their bags and manage to make a career somewhere else, far from Germany, where a law on stopping the admission of guest workers from 1973 is still in effect, which in its amendments makes an exception for... designers and fashion models, who apparently guarantee economic growth to a greater extent than communication technology specialists can.