By 2035, One in Four People in Germany Will Be 67+

In 2015 I moved from Ukraine to Germany, right in the middle of one of the biggest immigration waves the country had seen in decades. I did not know that at the time. German bureaucracy made it clear soon enough.

The first year was one long settling-in process: an apartment search that took five months, preparing every document the offices asked for, and working out how to book a Bürgeramt appointment (that part is much easier now, by the way).

Paperwork was the stress factor stacked on top of a new job, in a new country, in a language that was not my first.

That experience is why we are building Foldy: for immigrants and internationals in Germany whose daily life is shaped as much by bureaucracy as by opportunity.

But who are the people moving to Germany? Recently I started looking into the data to understand the patterns over time: who moves, who leaves, and who stays.

Who moves to Germany?

From 2010 to 2025 the immigration curve has two clear jumps, in 2015 and in 2022. I arrived in 2015, which explains a lot about why that first year was so hard. The system was not set up for that volume.

• The 2015 jump was driven mostly by the refugee crisis and by wars and violent conflict in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and other regions.
• The 2022 jump was driven mostly by the war in Ukraine, with more than one million arrivals in a few months.

Who are the immigrants and internationals in 2025?

Looking at 2025, the picture is diverse. The largest groups arriving in Germany come from a handful of countries, and the same countries also see many people leave.

Immigrants in Germany are a mixed group. They include skilled professionals, students, seasonal workers, and people who arrived years ago. Their reasons for coming differ, but they often face the same challenge: building a life in a system that was not designed around their language or their culture.

Who stays in Germany?

People stay when they can build a life in Germany that meets their needs: a family, social connections, a sense of being included and welcome, and stability at work. In short, when they can see Germany as the place for their future.

How many immigrants does Germany need?

Germany is getting older. Official projections expect that by 2035, around one in four people in the country will be 67 or older. As the workforce ages and shrinks, immigration is one of the main ways to keep it steady.

Even with the large numbers of people moving here, it is still not enough to meet that need.

Immigrants who stay provide a lasting economic benefit, because they:

• Work and pay taxes over many years
• Pay social security contributions
• Fill critical gaps in healthcare, engineering, IT, construction and transport
• Start businesses, rent or buy homes, and contribute to local communities
• Help offset the effects of an ageing and shrinking workforce

At the same time, the path in is not smooth. Only about 5 percent of the skilled workers who wanted to move to Germany actually did, mainly because of visa delays and language barriers. And one in three migrants who leave Germany names bureaucracy as one of the reasons for leaving.

Why this is personal

Based on my own experience, the data makes sense. I also struggled with German letters and other parts of the bureaucracy. In Ukraine I had one small folder. In Germany, people who have lived here for years keep 10 to 15 folders, depending on whether they have a family, property, insurance, and so on.

So Foldy became a way to connect the physical and the digital: to understand German letters in seconds, and to never lose an important piece of information again.

Sources

Sources: Destatis, migration between Germany and foreign countries, 1950 to 2025; Destatis, immigration and net immigration peaked in 2015; BAMF, Migration Report 2015; Destatis, 1.1 million arrivals of people from Ukraine in 2022; IAB, one third of leavers cite bureaucracy as a reason for leaving Germany; BAMF, Migration Report 2021; OECD; Destatis, 15th coordinated population projection.

AI transparency notice. This article was edited with AI assistance. Data were researched with Perplexity and verified against primary sources, and the graphs were generated in Claude Design from real data.