The number of childbirths in Germany has declined for years but a recent report has shown a rebound as migrant women accounted for almost one in four mothers in the country in 2016.
The German statistics office Destatis has now admitted that the 7 per cent rise in the number of childbirths is largely due to mass migration as the country saw 792,000 births that year, Le Parisien reports.
“German mothers gave birth to 607,500 children, 3 per cent more than in 2015 […] mothers of foreign nationalities gave birth to 184,660 children, which represents a 25 per cent increase compared to 2015,” the agency said making foreign women 23.3 per cent of all new mothers that year, or almost one out of four.
Due to the migrant crisis in 2015 and the influx of Syrian migrants, the number of Syrians who gave birth in Germany jumped from 4,800 in 2015 to 18,500 in 2016.
As a result, the German birth rate has gone from being one of the lowest in all of Europe, to average at 1.57 children per woman.
Earlier this year, a report from the German Federal Statistical Office showed that in 2016 the German population had grown as a whole solely due to mass migration.
Demographic changes have already begun to be felt in cities like Frankfurt where last year, for the first time, foreigners outnumber native Germans living in the city.
The trends have not been without problems, however. In the German capital of Berlin, many schools have a majority of students from migrant backgrounds which has led to “religious bullying” from primarily Muslim children, according to local teachers.
Hildegard Greif-Gross, director of the Peter Petersen Elementary School in Neukölln, claimed that the Muslim students would target Germans, now in the minority, for as little as bringing a ham sandwich to school for lunch because eating pork violates Islamic law.
This week, another case of religious bullying made headlines in another school in Berlin after a blonde German girl was bullied by Muslim students. The parents of the girl were outraged when the headmaster told them she should wear an Islamic headscarf to stop the harassment.
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