Germany would face massive labour shortages unless it begins recruiting skilled immigrants to replace those retiring from the country’s aging workforce, Federal Labour Agency Chairman Detlef Scheele told the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) newspaper last week.
“The fact is: Germany is running out of workers,” he said, noting that the country needs around 400,000 immigrants per year to fill this labour shortage especially in fields of nursing care, climate technicians, logisticians and academics.
Germany is not the only country, which suffers this aging problem of its workforce due to the continuous decline in birth rates. Instead, a study conducted a year ago predicted a dramatic reduction in the population in most countries by the end of the century.
The medical journal The Lancet published a study in July 2020 predicting declining fertility rates by the end of the century, everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa. Researchers from the University of Washington pinned the birth rate at 1.5 by 2100 – substantially less than the United Nation’s estimate of 1.8.
More than 20 countries – including Japan, Spain, Italy, and Poland – will see their population halved by then. And even China will see a drop to 730 million from 1.4 billion today as the study noted.
While such a drop in global population may appear to be serving the protection of depleted natural resources, researchers warn that given the world population’s growing life expectancy, particularly in rich and developed countries, this shrinking workforce will invert population pyramids, resulting in profound negative economic consequences.
This could justify why a country like China, the biggest populous nation in the world, has recently reconsidered its family planning restrictions by allowing women to have up to three children. The aim, as Beijing noted, is to improve birth policies to promote long-term and balanced population development.
Chinese people, might positively respond to this initiative given the firm restrictions that prevented all couples from having more than one child for long decades until Beijing government allowed families to have a second child in 2015. However, many analysts believe that many well-educated Chinese working women, especially those living in urban communities, might not show willingness to have big families.
The situation might be worse in Germany and other European countries, where working women postpone giving birth until after the age of 30 in order to maintain their careers. Despite the numerous incentives offered in these countries to encourage women have more children, the birth rate continues to decline, with France having the lowest rate at 1.2 children per woman and Malta having the highest rate at 1.9 children per women in Europe. Germany is still in the average in Europe with birth rate of around 1.5 children per woman.
This could explain why German officials believe that welcoming more immigrants to their country will solve their aging population problem and the resulting workforce shortage. However, far-rightists in Germany and other European countries oppose this idea, preferring to make people work longer hours or retrain those whose vocations have disappeared rather than letting more migrants into their countries in order to preserve the country’s demography.
However, such short-sighted vision might not survive long with the continuous population decline in these countries, in a way that jeopardises their economic progress. The solution, as the Socialist Democrat Scheele recently stated, is to significantly increase immigration to the country.
This would help alleviate the chronic problem of the displaced and migrant people, whose numbers continue to rise due to political and military conflicts that hit many parts of our world today, doubling the number of the displaced persons during the last decade to more than 82 million at end of 2020 according to the UN High Commissioner for refugees. This number is expected to increase this year with the eruption of the Afghan refugee problem following the American withdrawal and the Taliban’s takeover of the country.
So, will the developed countries reconsider their attitude towards immigrants if not on humanitarian grounds, then for the sake of preserving their economic progress?
