According to The Irish Times, Irish employers group IBEC said that immigration ruled need radical reform to fast-track visa applications for overseas finance workers.  The group warned that restricting migrants from outside of Europe was at odds with the country’s open industrial policy.  IBEC’s director called on the U.K. Government to adopt special migration measures for the financial sector to allow non-EU nationals to enter the labour market.  

"Our industrial policy is geared to attracting investment from key non-EU jurisdictions such as the US but our migration policy makes it difficult to bring senior staff to Ireland to establish new business here," director Aileen O’Donoghue said. ‘This does not make sense and needs to be reformed swiftly.  IBEC said the employment in by non-EU nationals in the financial services was up by 50 percent since 1998 and forecast to grow by a further 75 percent by 2020.  

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A report published by Expatica revealed that immigration has been the cause of half of Spain ’s growth over the past five years.  The government’s top economic adviser, Miguel Sebastian, said that immigrants "have improved the employment opportunities of Spaniards and have reduced the rate of structural unemployment," referring to joblessness that cannot be explained by economic cycles.  

The study also revealed that immigration has boosted the nation’s per capita income by an average of 0.3 percent annually over the past five years.  Sebastian notes that Spain ’s per capita income will exceed that of Italy in 2007 and that of Germany by 2014.  Sebastian says that although immigrants contribute less to the state treasury than their numbers would indicate, they also use fewer services, and so "the balance is positive and will continue being so in the short and medium term.  Things will only change around 2030," he said, when the immigrants of today are starting to retire, but he insists that "the general effects are positive."