BRUSSELS, Oct. 30 (UPI) -- A "blue card" plan to attract high-skilled immigrants to Europe will cause European governments to invest less in education, an immigration policy expert said.
Governments tend to spend little on education in the first place but with an immigration policy tailored to get skilled workers from abroad, "they will use it as an excuse" to cut back on the country's own costly educational programs, Aristide Zolberg, a professor at New York's New School University, said at a Belgian federal research and documentation center.
"Every country wants the same -- high-skilled, already trained workers. But I strongly disapprove of subcontracting education to other countries at the expense of not investing in one's own schools," Zolberg said at the Center for Historical Research and Documentation on War and Contemporary Society.
The author of "A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America" cited 2005 suburban Paris riots as an example of the consequences of having underperforming schools and "ghettoization," EUobserver.com reported.
EU envoys agreed last week on the fast-track blue card program to attract highly skilled immigrants like doctors, nurses and engineers from developing countries.
Similar to the U.S. green card program for foreign workers, the European plan seeks to draw an additional 20 million workers from Asia, Africa and Latin America in the next two decades.
Highly skilled foreign workers make up 1.7 percent of immigrant workers in the EU, compared with 3.2 percent in the United States, EU data show.
