A study to mark German reunification has found that over one-third of 35-year-olds in the country have a migration background.
Berlin’s Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) has released a special demographic report on those born in 1990 when East and West Germany were reunited after nearly half a century of separation.
Destatis found that around 1.1 million people were born in the year of reunification, representing 1.4 per cent of the total German population today, broadcaster NTV reported.
A significant cohort of those born in 1990 had an immigration background, meaning that they are either immigrants themselves or have at least one foreign-born parent.
According to the official statistician, 36 per cent of 35-year-olds living in Germany now have a migrant background, 80 per cent of whom migrated to the country after reunification.
In comparison, around 26 per cent of the German population has an immigration background, demonstrating the propensity of migrants to be younger than the general population.
While the study focussed on those born in 1990, many of those would have been born outside of the country at the time, and would have arrived amid the European Migrant Crisis sparked by former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to unilaterally open the gates of Europe to mass migration in 2015, resulting in some 1.5 million supposed refugees entering Germany in the ensuing five years, alone.
Although Merkel has maintained that she still believes it was the right decision to radically transform Germany through migration, the German public is much less convinced.
Asked last month by the Forsa polling firm if Germany has successfully coped with the sudden influx of millions of foreigners, just 21 per cent of the public agreed, compared to 41 per cent who said the country has not coped well and 37 per cent who believe Germany has “not coped at all.”
Successive governments in Berlin have attempted to tout the supposed economic necessity of mass migration to mitigate the impact on the jobs market due to declining birth rates.
However, such claims have increasingly come into question, with a recent study from the Federal Employment Agency (BA) finding that 33 per cent of all long-term unemployed people in Germany were migrants, or over 317,000 people. The figure is likely even higher in reality, as the study did not include migrants who obtained German citizenship.
In addition to the economic drain, mass migration has also come at a deep social cost, with the country experiencing a swath of migrant terror attacks over the past year, including in Mannheim, Solingen, Magdeburg, Aschaffenburg, and Munich.
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