’Bold solutions are missing’

Many branches of industry are engaged in a desperate search for workers. Experts at the Institute for Employment Research (Institut für Arbeitsmarktund Berufsforschung) see only one way out: annual net immigration of 400,000 people. Without a targeted immigration strategy, they say, the number of people in the workforce will drop by 7.2 million by 2035 as a result of continuing demographic change. In Germany, since 1972, there have been fewer children being born than people dying every year. Not only is the labour supply threatening to decline, but the population would have been shrinking for the past 50 years if the reduction had not been offset by immigration. "Demographic change will markedly change the conditions necessary for the development of prosperity and the quality of life in the coming years and decades in Germany," is how the German Federal Ministry of the Interior sums up the situation in its report "A Cross-Cutting View of Demographic Policy" published on 26 October 2021 at the end of the last legislative period of Parliament. "Our society is becoming older," the report continues, "and - in the long term, at least - population levels will probably shrink.