News

At the discussion “Economic Migration Policy in Lithuania" held on 31 March, Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Petras Vaitiekūnas stressed that economic migration is a very important issue today: currently the proportion between immigration and emigration, the balance of migration, is negative in our country.

“Lithuania is encountering two essential problems: a lot of Lithuanians are emigrating from the country, and Lithuania is losing the competition for brains against the countries in which the standard of living is higher and which apply a much more open immigration policy ”, minister P.Vaitiekūnas said, inviting the participants to discuss economic migration issues.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs together with the Ministries of Social Security and Labour, the Interior, Economy, and Finance have prepared proposals regarding the policy of labour coming from non-European Union countries and submitted them to the Government at the end of 2007. On 8 January this year, the Commission for Economic Migration Affairs approved these proposals giving them a status of principles for the policy concerning labour immigrating from third countries.At the beginning of this year the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced a public discussion about possible principles for Lithuanian economic migration policy and received a number of responses and opinions on this subject.

The Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs organised the discussion "Economic Migration Policy in Lithuania" with the goal of summing up these comments and discussing further steps in the area of the economic migration policy. The event was attended by politicians, members of the Commission for Economic Migration Affairs and representatives of business and business organisations, state institutions, the media, and academic society.

The participants in the discussion presented their proposals about managing economic migration, solving issues related to the lack of qualified specialists, confronting social, educational, and legislative improvement issues caused by economic migration and answering other related questions. The generalized proposals will be submitted to the Commission for Economic Migration Affairs.

In Lithuania, foreigners make up around one percent of the population, whereas in other European Union member states, this figure reaches 7–8 percent. In Lithuania, foreigners make up almost 0.8 percent of the total employed population, whereas in other EU countries this number is several times higher or sometimes it is higher even more than ten times.

This February, employers registered more than 20,000 vacant positions at territorial labour exchanges, and around 17,000 people looking for a job applied to territorial labour exchanges.