If you want to find out something about the development of the migrant population, you already have several statistical options at hand. The most widespread are the categorizations according to citizenship or so-called migration background. So in the first case according to whether someone has a German passport or not. The migration background is a bit more complicated: All people who were born without German citizenship or have at least one parent who was born without a German passport have one.
On Thursday, the Federal Statistical Office presented results for the new category “Immigrants and their direct descendants” for the first time; alternatively, they are also referred to as “persons with an immigrant background”. Based on the microcensus, their share of the total population in 2021 was 23 percent – that corresponds to 19 million people.
Only the “resident population” is recorded in the microcensus and not those people who live in communal accommodation; these are primarily asylum seekers who have not been in the country for long. As WELT learned from the Federal Statistical Office, an estimated 1.16 million people lived in communal accommodation at the end of 2021.
The “people with a history of immigration” are made up of 14.2 million people (17.3 percent) who have immigrated themselves since 1950, i.e. belong to the “first generation of immigrants”, as well as their direct descendants (second generation) – that is another 4 .7 million people (5.7 percent). The latter were born in Germany themselves, but both parents have immigrated to Germany since 1950.
In addition, in a further 3.7 million people (4.5 percent) who were born in Germany, only one of the parents had immigrated to Germany since 1950. However, this group is not included in the new category. In 2021, the “Federal Government’s expert commission on the framework conditions for integration ability” recommended that these people with only one immigrant parent – in contrast to the concept of a migration background – be excluded, the Federal Office announced. This commission is responsible for the introduction of the new category on the migrant population.
This recording difference regarding the children of only one immigrant parent is the main difference to the concept of “migration background”, which is still used. The difference between the statistical categories can be illustrated with an example: The rapper Bushido does have a “migration background” because he is the child of a German mother and a Tunisian father. However, he is not a “person with an immigrant background”.
One argument for the new category is that it should be easier to compare with the data from the other EU countries. So far, however, this has only been possible for the group of people who have immigrated themselves and not for their direct descendants.
On Thursday, the Federal Statistical Office published such an EU comparison on the “share of immigrants in the population in private households 2021”. With 17.3 percent, Germany is therefore above the EU average (10.6) and ahead of the populous countries France (10.6) and Spain (14.4), which are also heavily influenced by immigration.
Malta and Cyprus (over 22 percent) had higher shares than Germany, followed by Sweden (almost 22), Luxembourg (21), Austria and Ireland (around 19). The countries with the lowest proportions of immigrants were Bulgaria, Romania and Poland, each with less than one percent. Since the data refer to 2021, displaced Ukrainians are not included.
The background to the introduction of the new category was the demand for “integration ability” by a commission set up by the black-red government in 2019. The committee, which mainly consists of social scientists, then submitted its final report in 2021, in which the researchers initially distanced themselves from the eponymous concept of “integration ability”. However, they formulated the goal of replacing the term “migration background” with “immigrants and their direct descendants”. This new category has now been added – but the old one will not be replaced, also because comparisons over longer periods of time would be made more difficult.
