The number of Ukrainian refugees who see Germany as a permanent home rather than temporary place of shelter continues to rise, with a study finding six-in-ten saying they see it as “permanent”.
While the notion of refuge implies at least a sense of transience, the proportion of the 1.2 million Ukrainians who see their new lives in Germany as forever is high and rising compared to earlier research in previous years. Die Welt notes a study by the Federal Institute for Population Research which finds 59 per cent of Ukrainians in Germany say they intend to stay for “several years or permanently”.
Some 49 per cent of adults said they want to stay “forever”.
The results could suggest that, compared to earlier studies, the longer Ukrainians spend in Germany the less likely they are to ever want to go home. Breitbart News reported 44 per cent of Ukrainian refugees said they wanted to stay in Germany “forever” or for a “few more years” in 2023, and that 26 per cent they wanted to stay forever back in the winter of 2022, after less than a year of war.
The new Federal Institute research states the state of Ukrainian families has a major impact on the willingness of Ukrainians to go home when the war is over. While women generally came to Germany alone in the early days of the war, in many cases they have since been joined by their partners and in those cases, where the family is together in Germany, they are most likely to want to not return to Ukraine.
Yet many of those Ukrainian women who left their men behind, in many cases to fight, as they fled west from 2022 have since broken up with their partners while living away from them. The German statistics state a third of long-distance relationships between people in Germany and Ukraine have ended since the war began, and those women who had partners in Ukraine but now don’t are among those most likely to want to stay in Germany.
Perhaps another anchor factor of Ukrainians starting new lives in Germany is the rate of refugees in work, which has increased from 18 per cent of Ukrainian arrivals in 2022 to half today. While the Ukrainian government may look upon these developments with dismay — the return of its own young women post-war being likely essential to stave off economic and demographic collapse — the German statistical report articulated approval, calling Ukrainian refugees “an important resource for the German labor market.”
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