Migration Nation: Germany’s Population Grows Despite Fewest Young People Since End of WW2

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Chris Tomlinson

Germany has seen population growth in 2021 but statistics show that the share of younger people aged 15 to 25 among the overall population is just one in ten.

By the end of the last year, just one out of ten Germans were aged between 15 and 24, a figure down from one in six just 40 years prior. According to Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), the number of young people both proportionally and in absolute terms is the lowest it has been since at least 1950.

Destatis does note, however, that the overall German population has increased to a new high of 83.2 million.

The number of young people differs across each German regional state with Bremen having the highest proportion of young people at eleven per cent of the overall population, while just eight per cent lived in Brandenburg, Der Spiegel reports.

The number of young people has been declining across Germany since 2005, with a brief change in the trend in 2015 due to the migrant crisis but overall the number of young people peaked in the first part of the 1980s when people aged 15 to 24 were 16.7 per cent of the population.

Mass immigration has been touted by some as a method to fix Germany’s growing demographic challenges, including the Chairman of the German Board of the Federal Employment Agency Detlef Scheele, who argued last year that Germany needs at least 400,000 migrants per year to fill gaps in the labour market.

“You can stand up and say: We don’t want foreigners. But that doesn’t work,” Scheele said and added, “The fact is: Germany is running out of workers.”

As of this year, over a quarter of the people living in Germany are from migrant backgrounds, either being a foreigner themselves or born to at least one migrant parent. Some estimate that in the next 20 years or so, the population of migrant-background people in Germany will climb even higher, to a third.

Germany has also seen a low birthrate in recent years, with Destatis listing just 1.53 children being born per woman and the average age of mothers having their first child increased to over 30 years old, over a year older than a decade ago.

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com.

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