Among OECD member states, Germany is one of the countries that is most affected by demographic change. Without any migration and assuming the level of employment stays the same, its working-age population – based on illustrative calculations by the IAB – would fall by 16 million people or 35 per cent by 2060.
Meanwhile, the country has an acute need for additional skilled and unskilled workers. This applies to sectors such as healthcare and care, which have burgeoned as an area of employment in recent years. The shortage of skilled workers in care professions is all too familiar across Germany. It may therefore come as a surprise that foreign workers have, in fact, been making a significant contribution to closing these gaps in the care sector for some years now.
In 2020, the federal government introduced various legislative changes in order to make it generally easier to recruit skilled workers from other countries. They included the Skilled Immigration Act (FEG) and the fast-track procedure for skilled workers under section 81a of the Residence Act (AufenthG). Under the Act on the Further Development of Skilled Immigration, which was adopted in 2023, further legal changes regarding the migration of workers from non-EU countries entered into force in November of last year.
What are the benefits of and barriers to labour migration to Germany? How will policy measures impact the scale and makeup of this migration? How do legal and institutional rules and their implementation influence the migration of skilled workers and their integration into the labour market? What regional differences are there in terms of demographics and migration? And how do businesses go about hiring skilled workers from other countries? The IAB’s research focuses on these and other questions.
We have compiled a list of IAB publications and projects on this page that are related to the migration of skilled workers.