Global atlas

Western Europe · data through 2024

Germany

Germany is the largest destination in Europe, shaped by guest worker history, European Union movement, and two major protection intakes.

Twenty five year view

Movement in both directions

These lines show migrant stock, meaning people living outside their birth country at each point in time. They do not show annual arrivals.

Why people move

Leading documented drivers

  • • Skilled worker shortages in health, care, trades, and engineering
  • • Freedom of movement inside the European Union
  • • Protection routes for Syria, Afghanistan, and Ukraine
  • • Family reunification across decades of arrivals

Post war labour agreements brought workers from Türkiye, Italy, and the Balkans, freedom of movement brought Poles and Romanians, and 2015 and 2022 brought large protection intakes from Syria and Ukraine. A new skilled immigration law targets shortages.

Connections

Where movement connects

Common destinations

Switzerland, Austria, United States, United Kingdom, Spain

Common origins

Türkiye, Ukraine, Syria, Poland, Romania, Italy

Adapting and finding support

What helps

Recognition of foreign qualifications is a formal process that decides whether a nurse works as a nurse. Language level determines access to training and stable work.

Migration advice centres are free, independent, and available in many languages.

Use the support guide

Research that explains this pattern

What the scholarship says

Psychology

Four ways of adapting

Arriving people navigate two questions at once: how much of the culture of origin to keep, and how much of the new culture to take on. The combinations give integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalisation.

Integration, keeping both, is consistently linked to better wellbeing than any of the other three.

John W. Berry, acculturation theory

Psychology

Where the second generation lands

Children of immigrants do not follow one path. Outcomes depend on the parents' resources, the strength of the community, and the reception they meet.

The same family can produce very different outcomes across cities and school systems.

Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut, segmented assimilation

Psychology

Acculturative stress

The strain of language, status loss, discrimination, and unfamiliar systems produces a measurable load on health, distinct from the trauma of any journey.

Distress often peaks one to three years after arrival, not on the first day.

John W. Berry and colleagues; later clinical work on migrant mental health

Read the full scholarship library

Support inside and beyond Germany

Organisations people actually use

Migrationsberatung for adult immigrants

Free personal advice on language, work, housing, and everyday life.

Adults who have moved to Germany

Open

Recognition in Germany

Official guidance on getting foreign qualifications recognised.

Workers with qualifications from abroad

Open

UNHCR Help

Country by country guidance for refugees, people seeking asylum, and stateless people.

Refugees and people seeking asylum

Open

These are public organisations. The project is not affiliated with them and cannot guarantee outcomes. Nothing here is legal advice or an emergency service.

Ask for support in Germany

This is guidance and connection to organisations. It is not legal advice and it is not an emergency service.

Sources and reading

Germany data in the UN DESA International Migrant StockGermany data in the IOM World Migration ReportGermany data in the Migration Policy Institute data hubUNHCR Global Trends

Figures are rounded published estimates. Causes and adaptation differ within every country and should not be read as a verdict about any person.