Christoph Bangert for The New York Times  Victor GarcÃ­a, left, Cristina FernÃ¡ndez-Aparicio Ruiz, Albert Girones and Carolina MartÃ­nez are among the young professionals who have been drawn to Germany from Spain for employment.  SCHWÄBISCH HALL, Germany — While much of southern Europe is struggling with soaring unemployment rates, a robust Germany is desperate for educated workers, and it has begun to look south for the solution.  In the last 18 months, it has recruited thousands of the Continent’s best and brightest to this postcard-perfect town and many others like it, a migration of highly qualified young job-seekers that could set back Europe’s stragglers even more, while giving Germany a further leg up.  One of those helping forge the new era is Cristina Fernández-Aparicio Ruiz, 36, a newly arrived engineer from Spain, where unemployment just hit a depression-level 24.4 percent. She is working at an industrial company near here, trying to find a way to make a new elevator part mesh with older components.  Her German is spotty. But the company, Ziehl-Abegg, assigned her a mentor who made sure she had someone to sit with at lunch. And if she needed help finding a doctor or going to the supermarket, the company was ready to help with that, too.  “They are very nice here,” said Ms. Fernández-Aparicio, from Madrid. “And at the moment there are no jobs in Spain.”  The free movement of labor was one of the founding principles of the European Union, a central part of the effort to create a single, unified market. But in more prosperous times, few workers outside of Eastern Europe felt compelled to leave home.  That is changing under the pressures of the euro crisis and a harsh recession, and employers, governments and the migrants themselves are discovering that immigration, even when legal and nominally accepted, can raise tensions in ways that Europe’s founders may never have anticipated. Who wins and who loses — if anyone — is a matter of growing debate. But there is widespread agreement that Europe is rapidly entering a new era whose ramifications are only beginning to be understood.  For the most part, southern Europeans are relieved to find refuge in towns in this largely rural region in the state of Baden-Württemberg. But the strains of differing languages and cultures make many of the young migrants hang back when it comes to longer-term commitments like registering their cars here or signing up for two-year cellphone contracts.  The area is home to many of the small and medium-size family enterprises, known as the Mittelstand, that power Germany’s industrial export economy. But for many companies, finding qualified employees and keeping them is the challenge. There are 7,500 open jobs in Heilbronn-Franken, the region that is home to Schwäbisch Hall. These include everything from health care to hospitality, but the most dire need is for engineers.  When Hermann-Josef Pelgrim, the mayor here, invited several journalists from southern Europe to write about job opportunities in Schwäbisch (pronounced SHVAY-bish) Hall this year, the response to a glowing article by the Portuguese reporter was overwhelming. More than 15,000 unemployed Portuguese have since submitted their résumés. About 40 simply showed up.  In December, a planeload of 100 Spanish engineers flew to nearby Stuttgart for a weekend of job interviews. Within a month, about a third of them had been hired. And some German companies have been making connections over the Internet, simply plucking Spanish, Portuguese, Greek and Italian professionals from sites like LinkedIn.  Yet the migration — while urgently needed at the moment by both sides — has stirred fears that it may be conferring yet another advantage on Europe’s most powerful economy. German exporters have benefited from a euro dragged down in value by the struggling southern countries, and they are able to borrow money at rock-bottom rates as investors seek safe havens. Now, as the southern countries watch their young people move north, some are grumbling of a brain drain as well.  “This generation of young people who are leaving are our best qualified ever,” said César Castel, the director of operations for the Spanish branch of Adecco, a Swiss headhunting firm. “It is a huge loss of investment for Spain. On average it cost us 60,000 euros to train each engineer, and they are leaving.” That is about $80,000.
The recruitment of young, skilled southern Europeans has led to concerns that Germany is gaining another economic advantage over financially ailing European Union countries.