In the global context of the race for talent, frontrunners are easily identifiable: Canada, Australia, and the US lead the way on talent attractiveness, according to OECD indicators. Although some European countries (like Germany or Finland) also rank highly, the EU overall finds itself trailing far behind. This is inter alia due to the fragmentation of labour migration policies: while the EU shares some limited competences on migration, border, and asylum policies with its Member States, labour market policies remain fully under national jurisdiction; the same applies to admission conditions and labour migrant quotas.

While this is a challenging starting position, the EU has made it a priority to promote the attraction of international talent, as highlighted in Commission President Von der Leyen’s 2022 State of the Union speech. One of the EU’s defined goals is to strengthen its workforce to match the skills needs of EU labour markets, including by attracting skilled workers from outside the bloc. The need to improve legal migration channels and make the EU more attractive to labour migrants was also already highlighted in the 2020 New Pact on Migration and Asylum proposals, with the EU Talent Pool and the EU Talent Partnerships announced in 2021 and, more recently, in the ongoing recast of the Single Permit and the Long Term Resident Directives.

Since 2018, the Migration Partnership Facility (MPF) has funded 10 pilot projects that aim to develop meaningful partnerships between EU and non-EU countries on legal and labour migration, covering sectors such as ICT, green skills or agriculture. The objective of this presentation was to present practical insights into these projects and the lessons learned from them, and discuss the sustainability and scalability of legal migration initiatives across the EU. For instance, the Digital Explorers Project between Lithuania and Nigeria illustrates how talent partnerships can lead to the creation of knowledge on legal migration pathways and tackle stereotypes on the employment of third-country nationals in Europe.

Read more about the MPF-funded projects here.