When I visit Munich, I notice something that German labour statistics can easily hide.

Foreign labour has become ordinary. You hear different languages on buses and encounter immigrants throughout workplaces and public services. Some arrived recently. Others have spent years building their lives in Germany.

Germany worked hard to make that arrival easier. The more difficult question begins afterwards.

Will enough people stay?

I wrote about this problem in April. At the time, the available figures could tell us how many people were leaving Germany, while surveys showed that some immigrants were considering departure. Neither told us enough about the people who actually packed up and left.

We know more now.

Researchers at Germany’s Institute for Employment Research, or IAB, followed immigrants over time and compared what people said about leaving with what they eventually did. The results make Germany’s skilled-worker problem more complicated than a story about unhappy foreigners fleeing bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy certainly appears in the evidence. Family circumstances matter even more. Perhaps the most interesting finding concerns immigrants who have established themselves successfully enough to possess choices beyond Germany.

Germany still needs foreign workers

The demographic arithmetic has not disappeared because economic growth has been weak.

The Federal Employment Agency identified 157 occupations with skilled-worker shortages in 2025. Healthcare and care work remained particularly affected, as did construction and skilled trades. Foreign workers now account for about 14 percent of employees in shortage occupations, twice their share in 2014.

The dependence becomes particularly visible in care work.

Between June 2024 and June 2025, the number of German employees in the care sector fell by about 5,000. The number of foreign employees rose by roughly 46,000.

Germany is not merely preparing for a future demographic shortage. Parts of its labour market already depend on immigration.

Since 2024, according to the Federal Employment Agency, employment growth in Germany has been driven exclusively by foreign workers. German and EU employment has weakened as older workers retire and smaller generations enter the labour market.

Germany responded by opening more legal routes for workers from outside the European Union.

Five years after the Skilled Immigration Act took effect, the number of employees with employment-based residence or settlement permits had more than doubled. By June 2025, about 420,000 employees subject to social insurance contributions held such permits, compared with just over 200,000 in 2020.

Those numbers tell us that Germany can attract workers. They tell us much less about what happens five years later.

Attraction is only one side of the labour-market problem. I have also examined why foreign skilled workers can still struggle to get hired in Germany, even when employers report shortages. The difficulty is especially visible at the start of a career: international graduates can face a stubborn gap between Germany’s demand for IT skills and access to junior jobs. Recruitment and retention are therefore connected. A country cannot retain workers who never get a fair chance to establish themselves in its labour market.

The migration numbers changed sharply in 2025

Germany recorded 1,479,944 arrivals and 1,244,944 departures in 2025.

Net migration stood at 235,000.

A year earlier, Germany had recorded 1,694,192 arrivals against 1,264,009 departures, producing net migration of 430,183. The balance therefore fell by about 45 percent within a year.

Look more closely at those numbers.

Departures barely changed. Germany recorded roughly 1.26 million in 2024 and 1.25 million in 2025, while arrivals declined much more sharply.

It is tempting to put those departure numbers beside Germany’s labour shortages and announce a skilled-worker exodus. The statistics do not support that conclusion.

The 1.25 million departures do not represent 1.25 million skilled foreign workers. German migration statistics cover a much wider population, including Germans, students and people who came for temporary reasons. People born in Germany alone accounted for about 270,000 departures in 2025.

The distinction is important because a large migration number can produce a dramatic headline while telling us surprisingly little about skilled-worker retention.

For that question, we need to know who left.

The IAB has begun to give us an answer.

Researchers followed people who actually left

The IAB’s International Mobility Panel of Migrants in Germany follows immigrants over time rather than asking a single question on a single day.

Its first survey wave ran from December 2024 to April 2025. Researchers returned to participants between November 2025 and February 2026. More than 15,000 respondents formed the longitudinal dataset used for the latest analysis, with statistical weighting applied to draw conclusions about the study population.

Earlier results attracted attention because many immigrants said they had considered leaving Germany.

Intentions turned out to be a poor substitute for actual movement.

The follow-up found that 2.6 percent of the immigrants studied had left Germany by the second wave, equivalent to an estimated 260,000 people within the study’s target population.

Nearly half of those who departed had previously reported plans to leave. Yet almost two-thirds of respondents who had earlier said they planned to leave were still in Germany when researchers contacted them again.

Anyone who has made a serious migration decision can understand why the two figures diverge.

A job changes. A residence permit arrives after months of waiting. Family circumstances shift unexpectedly. The person who was determined to leave in January may have a completely different calculation by September.

The distinction between intention and behaviour matters particularly in immigration debates because a survey saying that hundreds of thousands are “considering leaving” can easily become a story claiming that Germany is about to lose them.

The IAB follow-up gives us something firmer.

Bureaucracy does push some people away

Among immigrants who actually left, 32 percent cited burdensome bureaucratic processes as a reason for leaving. Partnership and family considerations ranked higher.

The administrative complaints were quite specific.

Respondents criticised slow responses from authorities and procedures they found lengthy, expensive or difficult to understand. Younger immigrants tended to judge those processes more critically.

An immigration-office appointment can sound trivial when discussed as a policy statistic. It feels different when a person’s job or family arrangements depend on the document sitting somewhere inside that system.

A delayed residence decision may affect whether someone can change employers. Recognition of a professional qualification can determine what work a person is allowed to perform and how much that work pays. Family procedures can shape whether a spouse joins the migrant or remains hundreds of kilometres away.

For an employer, these are not merely irritating forms. A hospital waiting months for a nurse’s paperwork eventually sees the problem on its duty roster.

Germany can spend money recruiting workers abroad while losing some of the benefit through what happens after arrival.

The bureaucracy argument, however, only takes us so far.

Many departures have little to do with paperwork

Among immigrants who left Germany, 60 percent returned to their country of origin. The remainder moved onward, with Spain the largest destination in that group. Switzerland also attracted some of them.

Family connections help explain part of the movement.

People who left tended to be younger than those who remained and had spent less time in Germany. They were also more likely to have family abroad. A faster immigration office cannot remove those reasons for leaving.

The study becomes more interesting when researchers separate people who had previously announced plans to leave from those whose departure had not been anticipated.

Those who had already contemplated leaving were more often highly educated. Their English skills tended to be stronger, and German or EU citizenship or permanent residence was more common among them. They also earned higher hourly wages than people who departed without previously expressing plans to do so.

Secure status, in other words, does not necessarily end international mobility.

A well-qualified immigrant with professional experience and the right to remain in Germany may simply have more alternatives. Someone whose legal status or employment is precarious can have fewer practical choices even when that person is less satisfied.

Earlier IAB research had already found departure intentions among immigrants who were employed and well educated. Many had also integrated successfully into German society.

It would therefore be a mistake to read every intention to leave as evidence that integration failed.

Sometimes integration gives a person enough security to look elsewhere.

For Germany, this creates an awkward kind of competition. The country is trying to recruit workers who may later become attractive to employers somewhere else.

Germany’s demographic problem has not gone away

At the end of 2025, Germany’s population stood at about 83.5 million, around 110,000 lower than a year earlier.

The country recorded roughly 352,000 more deaths than births. Net immigration of 235,000 was no longer sufficient to offset that natural population decline.

Behind the annual political argument about migration sits a much slower process. Germany is ageing.

Its immigration system therefore has to do more than issue visas. Foreign workers need enough reason to remain economically active in Germany for immigration to ease the labour-force pressure created by demographic change.

The government recognises at least part of the administrative problem.

In September, Labour Minister Bärbel Bas said the government planned to push ahead with the digital Work-and-Stay Agency in 2027, with €775 million earmarked for its development.

A better digital system could shorten procedures and make them easier to understand. Germany has plenty of room for improvement there.

But no government portal can determine where somebody’s family wants to live. Nor can Berlin assume that a skilled employee who receives permanent residence will stop looking at opportunities elsewhere.

Immigration policy reaches a point where individual choice takes over.

Some people who left still want Germany

One IAB finding complicates the idea of departure most of all.

Among immigrants who had left Germany, 53 percent said retrospectively that they would have liked to remain longer or permanently.

Another 57 percent had considered moving back to Germany in the future.

A migrant who leaves Germany, then, is not necessarily casting a final vote against the country.

Return migration may reflect family circumstances at one stage of life. Moving elsewhere can be a career decision rather than a rejection of Germany. Some former residents may appear at a German airport again several years later carrying better qualifications and a different set of priorities.

The old picture of immigration was much straighter. Someone arrived, found work and gradually put down roots.

Skilled migration in Europe does not always behave that way. The borders are easier to cross for people who have citizenship, permanent status or qualifications employers want.

Germany’s retention problem therefore cannot be measured simply by counting departures. The better question is what happens to people after Germany has invested in attracting them, and whether leaving necessarily means losing them for good.

From Karachi, Germany’s immigration debate often appears preoccupied with the front door: who enters, under which rules and in what numbers.

The IAB evidence draws my attention elsewhere.

Germany has spent years changing the rules for getting foreign workers through that door. The harder part begins once those workers have enough security, experience and freedom to decide whether Germany is still where they want to be.