The European Blue Card in The Netherlands; an Easier Ride to Highly Skilled Migrant Employment?
By Ted L. Badoux
The Blue Card is the first work permit in a European legal format. By no means (as the term ‘Blue Card’ may suggest) does it provide free movement to highly skilled third-country nationals to work in the European Union.
Firstly, the UK and Ireland have opted out. No Blue Card movement at all in those countries.
Then, the key requirements, (which are quite strict): applicants need to have an employment contract for at least one year, higher professional qualifications and a threshold salary of 1.5 of the gross national average in the Member State of employment. These requirements demonstrate that in the global race for talent, the Directive’s aim was only limited to harmonizing and supporting the migration of young highly skilled professionals. Much of the debate in the European Parliament about the Directive was devoted to controlling brain drain.
In the Netherlands, the uniform European Blue Card has been available since June 20, 2011. It was in time to meet the European Commission’s deadline for implementing the EU Blue Card Directive from 2009. Five other Member States had to be summoned by the Commission, but at least The Dutch were on time, although perhaps somewhat less enthusiastically. In Brussels, the Dutch fought in vain for better mobility but had, at least, saved their own national programme for highly skilled migrants, which has run very successfully since 2005.
What is the Blue Card like in The Netherlands? Politically, it’s much debated by practitioners and in academic circles, but as an instrument of legal migration to The Netherlands the policy is rarely used. That is, as yet, but we may see that change in 2014 and remarkably, this may come from the 2013 law that introduced a mandatory and enforceable sponsorship for employers of highly-skilled migrants.
In the application statistics of the Dutch Immigration Department IND since 2011 (the year of implementation of the Directive), you will not find Blue Card application numbers. The application numbers in the IND annual reports for 2009 - 2012 show that an influx of foreign employees through the Netherlands national policy for highly skilled migrants varied from 5 to 6.5 thousand applications were granted each year. In the Annual Report of 2011, there were a couple sentences introducing the Blue Card as an EU-designed work permit for highly-skilled migrants along with the Dutch programme for highly-skilled migrants. The paragraph closes with: “So far, a small number of applicants have used this new policy.”