North-Rhine Westphalia’s Minister-President Hendrik Wüst departed Düsseldorf on Sunday evening, beginning a three-day visit to Ankara and Istanbul that is timed to the 65th anniversary of the 1961 German-Turkish recruitment agreement. That accord opened the door for hundreds of thousands of so-called “Gastarbeiter” to take up factory jobs in Germany—an episode that still shapes the country’s immigration debate and its demography today. In Ankara, Wüst will meet Labour Minister Vedat Işıkhan and representatives of the Turkish Employers’ Association to discuss how both sides can modernise the bilateral framework for skilled-worker mobility. Germany’s re-engineered Skilled Immigration Act, which starts rolling out new “Chancenkarte” points and salary-threshold rules on 1 October 2026, is high on the agenda—Turkish officials want to ensure their nationals can benefit from faster recognition of vocational qualifications. On Tuesday the delegation moves to Istanbul for a German-Turkish business conference co-hosted by NRW.Global Business. NRW is home to roughly a third of Germany’s residents with Turkish roots and maintains trade worth €10–12 billion a year with Turkey. Companies such as Siemens, Evonik and Lanxess, all with sizeable expatriate communities in NRW, are expected to brief Wüst on persistent visa-processing bottlenecks at German missions in Turkey and the impact on project timelines. The trip will culminate in the presentation of a Tolerance & Reconciliation Award to national-team footballer İlkay Gündoğan—an event the NRW government hopes will underline the value of circular mobility and dual cultural identities. Mobility managers should watch the visit closely: Ankara is pushing Berlin for a limited “business travel facilitation” arrangement that could trim Schengen appointment waiting times for Turkish engineers and installers serving German clients. If the pilot is adopted, firms in NRW’s machinery and energy clusters could obtain multiple-entry visas for key Turkish technicians in weeks rather than months—an outcome that would ease current staffing headaches in large retrofit and maintenance contracts.
Source: Süddeutsche Zeitung / dpa
