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Either for humanitarian reasons, or because Germany has an ageing population and desperately needs young workers to support its welfare state.



It is one. The majority of migrants, qualified or not, have a hard time getting work permits. Finding work, low paid but paid, isn't the main challenge. Doesn't do any good if you aren't allowed to take that work so.

Also, our social systems are doing well. Thanks for worrying.


"our social systems are doing well"

If you include pension systems, not so much. "Altersarmut" ("poverty of the old age") was not a widely used word in the 1990s, now it is a frequent topic in German media.

In many other European countries, old people live in their own properties with mortgages long paid off, so they aren't directly touched by rent increases. But Germans, for some reason, mostly like to live in rented flats and have a comparatively low home ownership rate, even in their old age. And the rents have grown quite a lot in big German cities. This means quite a squeeze for the elderly.


True. And we have Hartz IV, a national shame in my opinion. My point to OP was that, besides these facts, our social system is nowhere near to collapsing. No matter how many refugees we take in. That we as a nation, and that includes myself through our representative democracy, are ok with poor and old people being squeezed out of living space by rent seeking investors and treating people under Hartz IV as second class citizens is a different story. But we have elections in September, so there is a chance to shake things up a little bit.


mostly the latter - plus a need for more highly skilled workers in certain shortage occupations.




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