A hundred days before the announced reduction in the quota for Western Balkan citizens eligible to work in Germany, German construction companies are warning that the cut will lead to job losses and damage numerous projects.
The so-called Western Balkans Regulation allows workers from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia to take up employment and reside in Germany provided they have previously secured an employment contract with a German employer.
The German government plans to halve the annual quota for such workers from 1st January 2027, reducing it from 50,000 to 25,000.
The Central Federation of the German Construction Industry (ZDB) has warned that this would be a severe blow to the sector, given that it accounts for roughly 30% of all work visas issued to Western Balkan citizens. It highlights that no other sector relies on this preferential work visa regime as heavily as construction.
“On building sites, every seventh employee holds a foreign passport. For the construction industry, this is the most successful model for recruiting labour and skilled professionals from third countries,” said ZDB President Felix Paklepa.
He stated that the association strongly cautions against halving the quota, as doing so could result in the construction sector losing 8,000 workers by the end of this year alone.
Paklepa pointed out that the German Federal Government is injecting billions of euros from a special budget into bridges, railways and housing, while simultaneously curtailing the influx of the very people needed to build those projects.
The ZDB statement notes that the numbers speak for themselves, as the quota for 2025 was fully exhausted by late November of that year, leaving subsequent applications rejected.
It adds that the German Federal Employment Agency issued as many as 105,000 approvals last year because, due to lengthy visa processing times, approved applications for employers do not nearly all translate into actual arrivals of workers in Germany.
The regulation has precisely the effect that the political leadership expects from legal migration, the ZDB writes: research shows that 98% of workers who migrate from the Western Balkans actually perform their contracted job, and 58% are skilled labour, specialists or experts, even though that is not a formal prerequisite.
Consequently, the ZDB is urging the German government not to reduce the quota and to keep it at a minimum of 50,000 people, to digitise and streamline visa issuance, and to explore the possibility of extending a similar preferential regulation to other countries.
(021.rs, 27.09.2026)