You made my point. €42k may be a fair wage for writing APIs but it's in no way a skill or a salary you can claim there's a shortage on within the EU workforce like doctors for example, to justify importing external workers.

You say you have a shortage for API devs?

Then either:

1) pay more at which point you'll be flooded with aplicants and if not then you have a real claim for skill shortage with the government and can secure visas for immigrant workers or

2)train them yourself, there's plenty of motivated people of all ages willing to learn something that's in demand. Simples.

But what's that?! Investing in the workforce is too expensive for the shareholders?! Boo-hoo, my heart bleeds for the poor companies and their offshore accounts.

If there were not a shortage of API devs, salary for programmers wouldn’t have gone through the roof. You can’t just say because there are a couple million programmer there are definitely no shortage of them. The market demand just happened to be higher.

Since when is €42k salary considered as being through the roof?

That’s more of a chicken and egg problem. As you’ve said, if there were no foreign talent availability, prices would have been lot higher. Just look at the USA.

Whether you want to keep that is another thing in itself. From what I see, the availability for large amount of beginners (Not necessarily foreign, see bootcamp) does not affect the market value for experienced programmers at all.

Tech companies cluster in big cities, which are expensive. 50k in a small town is lots, 50k in London or Amsterdam is pocket money.

Yeah, so the EU should focus more on stimulating remote work instead of stuffing cities like the rest of the world.

If we can figure out how to make remote work successful in general rather than in a few headline-grabbing examples, everyone here will be directly competing with people whose annual rent is less than your monthly rent.

That’ll be great for the world, but not for us — it’ll make this argument about €50k/year salaries depressing our wages seem bizarre to future generations.

While I agree that this needs to be the future, nearly all current development shows that this isn't the case - worldwide. I couldn't name a country with a strong software industry where it isn't concentrated in one or two large cities.