It is my pleasure to announce the following international symposium to be held in Hamburg, Germany, on 15.-16. December 2011.
International Migration of Highly Skilled Workers to Japan and Germany - Current Models and Future Outlooks International Symposium at the Chamber of Commerce, Hamburg (in English Language) 15/16 December 2011

Japan and Germany are both countries facing increasing economic competition from the newly industrializing countries. Moreover, both Japan and Germany are rapidly aging societies, which due to a decline in working age population will face severe labor shortages in the all too near future. In order to keep their positions as two of the world's leading economies, they need to focus on training highly skilled personnel to match the economic structural change. Efforts in both countries to invite highly skilled migrants or to engage in advanced vocational training of migrants already residing in the country have either been few or of little success.
Questions in this realm, which need to be discussed more thoroughly and are thus raised in this symposium include the following: Which criteria do governments set for desired migration, and how do they aim at implementing these criteria? Which other actors (business federations, labor unions, nongovernmental
organizations) influence the shaping of immigration - and integration - policies? How does immigration change the societal structure of the receiving countries, and how can these changes be addressed coherently? The symposium aims at contributing to the ongoing discourse on how to achieve well-directed immigration to industrialized nations.

December 15-16, Hamburg Chamber of Commerce, Adolphsplatz 1, 20457 Hamburg

Please refer to the following website for further information http://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/japan/migration/symposium
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Sincerely,
Ruth Achenbach

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Ruth Achenbach, M.A.
Universitat Hamburg
Abteilung fur Sprache und Kultur Japans