Basque firms recruit 150 engineers in Colombia and Mexico

Basque companies seek 150 engineers in Mexico and Colombia

A young engineer attends an interview and asks for a month's rent payment, transport to the industrial park, or help with paperwork. The usual response is a grimace. Change the scene, and the grimace becomes a red carpet: thirty Basque companies travel to Colombia and Mexico with paid flights, two months' salary in advance, one month's rent, and immigration paperwork handled, to bring in 150 vacancies for engineers and technicians they claim they cannot fill in the Basque Country.

The package offered to those coming from abroad

This list of benefits is not an exception or the gesture of a single company. The businesses commit to covering the ticket, advancing two paychecks, assuming the first month's housing costs, and managing permits and visas. The program brings together the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Social Security, and the Basque employers' association Confebask, with the Basque Government assisting in finding housing, processing documents, and selecting candidates.

Here lies the stinging contrast. A Spanish graduate negotiating half of these details receives a no. Those arriving from across the Atlantic find the path prepared. This is not rhetoric: it is a recruitment policy, written and backed by institutional support.

Salaries: 36,250 euros for those over 30 and 29,000 for younger workers

The Ministry controls the figures. The floor for those over 30 is set at 36,250 euros gross; for those under 30 with little or no professional experience, at 29,000. These are floors, not ceilings, but they mark the range defining this operation.

There is disagreement on whether these amounts align with the cost of living. Some argue that such a salary is insufficient to live in Bilbao or San Sebastián, two of the most expensive cities in northern Spain, and that rental prices alone explain why local candidates are not biting. The business response is always the same: the problem is not money, but the lack of available professionals.

The catalog of hard-to-fill occupations

The lever enabling this is an official list of professions 'difficult to fill.' Entering this list unlocks extraordinary measures: bringing in foreign labor, accelerating visas, and bypassing routine bureaucracy. This is the door through which the Basque expedition passes.

The delicate point is not this specific profession, but the precedent. What is justified today by a supposed shortage of engineers could be replicated tomorrow for any occupation an employers' group manages to list. It would suffice to argue that no candidates appear, without discussing at what price the jobs were being offered.

Are there shortages of engineers or uncompetitive salaries?

This question runs through the entire issue. Spain has been graduating entire cohorts of engineers and technicians for years, yet thousands have packed their bags for Germany, the Netherlands, or the UK. The shortage argument clashes with this simple fact: if the job is well-paid and well-treated, people appear. If not, turnover increases.

Against this weighs a reality businesses repeat: there are very specific profiles—certain technical specialties, specific industrial trades—for which they simply cannot find candidates with the required experience. Unions reject the approach, viewing it as a way to suppress wages by relying on workers who, upon arrival, have less bargaining power: tied to a visa, to housing arranged for them, and to a contract signed before even stepping into the country.

A pilot test opening the door to 400,000 vacancies

The Ministry itself frames this as a pilot experience. If successful, according to its own statements, it will be repeated to fill the 400,000 vacancies it calculates need to be covered. From controlled experiment to standard policy, without debating the scale it deserves.

The echo does not stay in the Basque Country. In Madrid, according to the case analysis, this phenomenon has been running for some time in offices and qualified profiles: the arrival of professionals trained in Latin America who accept conditions local candidates reject, helping to keep salary bands low. What sounds like novelty here is already custom there.

The employers' association admits, without shame, that some of the newly arrived will leave shortly for better offers. The program continues anyway. And the data that does not fully fit: all this apparatus is set up to import talent into a labor market still carrying the highest unemployment rate in the European Union.