Migration drives German population to record high in 2022

GERMANY’S population rose to an all-time high of 84.3 million people in 2022, after stagnating over the past three years, as Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war came to Germany.

In 2022, there were 1.1 million more people living in Germany than in the previous year, the federal statistics office said on Thursday (Jan 19). Immigrants more than compensated for the country’s low birth rate and ageing population.

In just the first half of the year, Ukrainians who arrived in Germany swelled the population by 740,000. At the peak of the 2015 refugee crisis prompted by violence in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, Germany added 756,000 new residents.

The flow of immigrants coming from countries other than Ukraine also increased in 2022, following years of sluggish growth due to the Covid-19 pandemic, data from the statistics office showed.

It added that the balance between the number of immigrants and emigrants was at its highest level since Germany started collecting the statistics in 1950, and four times higher than in the previous year. 

The arrival of immigrants of working age (15 to 63 years) compensated for the growing ageing population. While the overall working-age proportion was 61.6 per cent of Germans in 2022, it was 75.9 per cent among people who came from abroad. REUTERS