Migration drives Germany's population to record high in 2022

Germany's population reached an all-time high of 84.3 million people in 2022, driven by record net immigration, the federal statistics office has said.

The population of Germany grew by 1.1 million in 2022 compared with the end of 2021, the office said.

Net immigration was more than four times higher than in the previous year, and stood at the highest level since records began in 1950.


The new figures show that "external migration is important for population development in Germany", Sebastian Kluesener, research director at the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB), told Xinhua.

Destatis underlined that "without net immigration, the population would already have been shrinking since 1972, as more people have died than were born every year since".

In mid-2022, Europe's largest economy was lacking more than half a million skilled workers across all occupational groups, according to the German Economic Institute (IW).

The social and healthcare sectors were the worst affected. The German government therefore updated the country's Skilled Immigration Act in order to accelerate the recruitment of skilled workers from non-EU countries.

"To be able to compete for talent and auxiliary workers, we are offering new, and more importantly, more straightforward ways to work in Germany," said Federal Labour Minister Hubertus Heil, adding that the goal was to create the most modern immigration legislation in Europe.