He said that bringing cheap labor to Latvia is out of the question as full employment has not been reached, and the re-training program is not yet fully operational. Many people, he added, want to re-train for professions for which there is no demand.
"If we will not have strengthened the matters of language, as a small nation we'll be, on some level, threatened," he said, arguing for a careful, regulated approach to labor shortages.
"Just because there are no people we can't carelessly open the job market to cheap labor," he said.
In February Latvia approved a list of 237 professions where there is a shortage of labor force in Latvia and for which highly-skilled specialists from abroad could be attracted.
Arnis Sauka, a professor at the Riga Stockholm School of Economics, earlier argued that opening up Latvia's labor market is all but unavoidable.
