In 2025, Germany faces a demographic and economic paradox: more and more citizens—especially young, qualified ones—are leaving the country, while the government and much of the economic establishment insist on the need to attract up to 400,000 net immigrants per year to sustain the labor market.
The trend is not new, but it is alarming. Between January and April alone, 93,000 Germans left their country for destinations abroad. If the pace continues, the year could end with a historic record for emigration, surpassing the 296,986 cases of 2024. And contrary to the stereotype of the retiree heading for warmer climates, the majority of the emigrants are under 40, with university degrees and professional experience.
Since 2005, the net migration of German citizens has been negative: more leave than return. The overall population growth is sustained only by the arrival of asylum seekers and migrants, mainly from Western Asia and Africa. This immigration, however, does not compensate for the loss of human capital: many newcomers lack professional qualifications, and nearly half of Germany’s welfare recipients are not nationals.
The official narrative—backed by the government and economists such as Marcel Fratzscher of the German Institute for Economic Research—holds that the only way to maintain employment levels is to bring in 400,000 workers per year. But according to the Federal Employment Agency itself, this would mean admitting 1.7 million people annually to offset emigration. And in that calculation, there is no plan to retain the Germans who are leaving.
The reasons for the exodus are clear: high taxes, suffocating bureaucracy, growing insecurity in cities, and a notable deterioration in public services, especially education. Between 2014 and 2024, the number of students increased by 800,000, yet today there are 110,000 vacant teaching posts, forcing schools to fill positions with staff lacking pedagogical training or to cancel classes outright.
This does not even account for the loss of educational quality in the effort to ‘integrate’ the large influx of new students arriving with little or no preparation for the German or European labor market.
At the same time, housing has become more expensive, and construction has plummeted, making accommodating newcomers more difficult. Despite this, authorities have not implemented reforms to curb the brain drain, improve educational quality, or ensure sustainable pensions—factors crucial for thousands of young people who opt to start over in other countries.
But the problem goes beyond economics. The continued loss of young, skilled human capital undermines long-term competitiveness, the sustainability of the welfare state, and even political stability. A shrinking working-age population, replaced by a constant influx of low-skilled immigrants with integration difficulties, increases pressure on social assistance systems and strains the country’s cultural cohesion. In the medium term, the risk is not only a weaker economy but also a more fragmented and less secure Germany.
Adding to this is a contradiction not unique to Berlin. France and Spain—with much higher unemployment rates, around 7.5% and 12% respectively—maintain open-door policies for mass immigration despite having millions of unemployed nationals and young people shut out of the labor market.
In both cases, as in Germany, political rhetoric insists that the arrival of new migrants is indispensable to fill supposed labor shortages, even though a large portion of the newcomers end up relying on public subsidies and fail to contribute effectively to state revenues. Another oft-repeated slogan is that “they come to pay our pensions,” when, at least in Spain, the pension system is entirely insolvent and already accounts for around 12% of GDP.
The comparison reveals a common pattern in Europe’s largest economies: instead of designing policies to encourage their own citizens to stay, improve their skills, and foster business creation, governments prefer to compensate for the gaps with mass immigration—ignoring the effect of this strategy on social cohesion and demographic balance.
