The open borders agenda of Germany saw net migration hit a record high in the country last year, yet the government is set to ease immigration standards even further.
According to Germany’s official statistician, Destatis, 2.67 million foreigners migrated to the country in 2022, while 1.2 million left, resulting in a record high net migration of 1.46 million people.
The number of people who entered the country was nearly double over the previous year, when 1.32 million migrants arrived compared to 994,000 people leaving Germany, public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported.
The main driver of the staggering increase was the war in Ukraine, which saw 1.1 million refugees flee West to Germany from the war-torn country. The statistician agency said that the main flows of Ukrainian refugees came between March and May of last year — shortly after the Russian invasion — before declining steadily from August of 2022.
While the arrivals of Ukrainians in Germany is a remarkable and sudden movement of people, it is only a small part of the over eight million Ukrainians said to have gone abroad to escape the war in total, the vast majority to European states.
Ukrainian refugees were not the only drivers of the increase in Germany, however, with numbers of migrants arriving from Afghanistan, Turkey, and Syria also surging. There was also a slight increase in migration from other EU nations, mainly from Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania.
The massive waves of immigration has resulted in a record population of 84.4 million people by the end of 2022, an increase of over 4 million people in comparison to the figures recorded during the 2011 Census, which put the population at 80.2 million.
Despite the negative ramifications of mass migration, such as depressing wages and the strain put on Germany’s generous welfare state, the left-wing coalition government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz pushed through legislation this week to make it easier to migrate to the country.
The immigration reform, which was approved this week by the Bundestag, seeks to encourage more people from non-EU countries to immigrate to Germany by lowering qualification standards for work visas, specifically surrounding German language requirements.
Antifa-linked mass migration advocate Interior Minister Nancy Faeser of the leftist Social Democrats Party (SPD) claimed that the lessening of work qualifications will “secure prosperity in Germany”.
Bundestag member Norbert Kleinwächter of the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) was rather more critical of the law, saying that the legislation would turn Germany into a “junk country” (Ramschland).
“What you have put together in a 100-page draft law could be summed up in one sentence,” Kleinwächter said. “Everyone gets in, but no one gets thrown out.”
The refusal of the neo-liberal political establishment in Berlin to reign in mass migration, as well as failures in the economy and energy, has been a motivating factor for the rise of the AfD, which is now polling ahead of Chancellor Scholz’s Social Democrats and last week won its first-ever governing position since the party’s formation in 2013.
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