Germany is still popular as a country of immigration. This is the result of a study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Accordingly, Germany is still the second most popular immigration country compared to the OECD countries after the USA.
Escape is less and less a reason to emigrate to Germany. Instead, more and more people would come to work or study in the Federal Republic, said OECD migration expert Thomas Liebig. Thus, the Federal Republic of France replaced for the first time as the main non-English-speaking receiving country for international students.
By contrast, according to the 2018 study, the number of initial applications for asylum in Germany fell by 18.3 percent to 162,000 applications. In all 36 member states of the OECD, 1.07 million initial applications were submitted last year, 35 percent less than in the record years of 2015 and 2016. However, the OECD expects that there will be a large influx of asylum seekers again in the coming years could. "We just do not know when".
Asylum applications from the Western Balkans go back
The chances of immigrants finding a job in Germany are very good: at the end of 2018, 70 percent of immigrants in Germany had work for the first time. However, the quality of the jobs is modest, many immigrants are poorly paid and are overqualified.
As a result, fewer and fewer people come to Germany to work from Eastern Europe - Poland, for example, is increasingly developing from the country of origin to the destination country for migrant workers. Instead, people from the Western Balkans are increasingly looking for work in Germany.
At the same time, the number of asylum applications from the region is decreasing. "This is a success of the so-called Western Balkans regulation," said OECD expert Liebig. During the refugee crisis at the end of 2015, Germany had created a special temporary scheme until the end of 2020, which opens up the prospect of a visa to low-skilled job seekers from countries such as Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Albania, Bosnia and northern Macedonia.
It should also be avoided that they try to immigrate to Germany by applying for asylum. That worked well, said Liebig. In this respect, the Western Balkans regulation could also serve as a model for other OECD countries.