Wir schaffen das? The latest report of the Federal Office for Migration and Asylum has arrived. An instructive read.
report of the German Federal Office for Migration and Asylum, which still presents data from 2022 .
Hard fact, reliable German figure: in 2019, 211,740 Hungarians lived in Germany, while on December 31, 2022 (i.e. at the end of the election year when
in the two weeks following the closing of the polls, only Anna Donáth's "five gay friends" immediately left the country due to her alleged hopelessness)
their number was 214,695. A total of 2,955 more people during the four years. It is easy to see that the number of emigrants is not so low (especially considering the simultaneous increase of 135,000 Romanians), just as it is unlikely that the Hungarians in Germany will sublimate over time (after all, even such a large number do not apply for citizenship); rather, it is mostly a matter of changing places: the new ones go, others happen to get their sweets and come home. And really:
even in the year 2022, which was particularly packed with suitcases, the number of emigrants exceeded those returning from Germany by only 4,021,
thus the number of Hungarians there increased by 1960 that year (while the number of Romanians increased by 39,000).
It is particularly interesting that 6 percent of the Hungarians living in Germany were born in Germany, which is a low proportion compared to the citizens of other countries - in the case of Romanians and Bulgarians who joined the European Union later, this is 8.2 percent, and in the case of Croats it is 13.7 percent.
A mere 28,000 Hungarian minors live in Germany, compared to 167,000 Romanian minors, 60,000 Croatian minors, or even 38,000 Greeks.
Clever statisticians would obviously be able to draw more professional conclusions from this than a layman like myself, in any case, it is possible to make a cautious guess that many families are quietly leaking home.
In any case, the report states: in 2021, emigration exceeded return emigration in twenty of the EU member states (this includes Germany, which has already lost 600,000 Germans since 2010; but we also find Belgium, France and Sweden here); in contrast
the German office counts Portugal, Ireland and Hungary among the 11 member states showing a positive return migration balance.
By the way, 2,052 Germans arrived in Hungary in 2022, which puts the country between Thailand and Belgium on the list of destination countries (for comparison: 3,214 Germans moved to Italy, which offers coastal dolce vita, and 2,757 to Portugal).
Unfortunately, the report does not include the age composition of Germans migrating to Hungary; overall, however, the claim that there is emigration from Germany only because well-off pensioners are flocking to sunnier regions is not proven -
according to the data, only 6.3 percent of those leaving are older than 65.
But those who believe that there is no significant difference in the end result between a guest worker and an uncontrolled influx of illegal migrants may come across interesting data.
As is well known, around the 1960s, Germany signed separate agreements for the reception of guest workers, among others, with Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Turkey. As a result, the proportion of foreigners reached 4.5 percent in 1970, compared to 1.2 percent in 1961, i.e. it increased by more than 3 percentage points in a decade; then the years went by, and after a small amount of constant growth and occasional stagnation, by 2014 the proportion of non-German citizens was close to 9.3 percent. A narrow five percentage point increase over 44 years.
That then between 2014 and 2022 - oops! – the indicator should jump from 9.3 to 14.6 percent; which means more than 5 percentage points in eight years.
It is loosely related that in 2022 "suspects staying in the country illegally" committed 176,433 crimes, while foreigners legally staying in the country committed 607 thousand; this deserves a podium place behind the 2015 and 2016 crime records. How much better the situation will be in 2023 is questionable for the time being: according to data published by
In 2023, the number of violent crimes committed by young people in groups increased by 13 percent in the capital, there were 7 percent more knife attacks (almost ten per day), the number of burglaries jumped by one and a half times and a third more cars were stolen.
Regarding the future, it can also be stated that on December 31, 2022, 58.6 percent of foreigners living in Germany were younger than 40 years old, while only 40.6 percent of German citizens were.
The fertility rate among German women in 2022 was 1.36, while for foreigners it was 1.88 - which is a serious drop compared to 2.28 in 2016: thus, compared to natives, their rate is only 40 percent.
Featured image: MTI/EPA/AFP/Ludovic Marin
