Germany's Welfare System Has a Migration Problem

A new set of figures from Germany's Federal Employment Agency exposes a stark pattern in long-term unemployment: foreign nationals are climbing the statistics at speed, skewing older and lacking vocational qualifications almost across the board.

Migration is testing Germany's welfare system.

Migration pressure is testing the limits of Germany’s welfare system. Photo: Jochen Eckel/APA-Images/imageBROKER

Germany's "skilled workers" narrative is showing deep cracks in the unemployment statistics. A new special analysis from the Federal Employment Agency reveals just how heavily foreigners now feature among the long-term unemployed, figures compiled at the request of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) parliamentary group in the Bundestag.

A person counts as long-term unemployed if they have been out of work for a year or longer. In 2025, this applied to around 1.036 million people in Germany, out of roughly three million unemployed people in total. In other words, more than one in three unemployed people had permanently dropped out of the labor market. The number of long-term unemployed has risen sharply since 2018, when it stood at 813,400. The foreign share is growing especially fast: in 2018, 23% of the long-term unemployed did not hold German citizenship; by 2025, that figure had climbed to 33%. The absolute number of long-term unemployed foreigners rose by around 61% over the same period.

These figures capture citizenship, not origin, meaning naturalized migrants are counted as Germans and the true extent of migration background among long-term unemployed Germans cannot be determined. Still, the numbers that are visible are damning enough: immigration has funneled hundreds of thousands of people into a system that many can barely escape.

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No Qualification, Permanent Benefits

Qualification, more than any other factor, determines who gets stuck. Roughly half of long-term unemployed Germans never completed vocational training. Among long-term unemployed foreigners, that figure approaches 80%.

The pattern challenges much of the political narrative around skilled migration. Arriving without a usable qualification, without sufficient language skills and without a stable employment history does not make someone a skilled worker. Instead, many are drawn into a recurring cycle: basic income support (Bürgergeld), a language course, a program, a job placement attempt, a dropout, then a new application. What should be integration into the workforce becomes, in practice, the administration of transfer payments.

Older workers fare worst of all. In 2025, a third of all long-term unemployed were over 55. Among long-term unemployed Germans in this age bracket, numbers rose 29% since 2018. Among foreigners, the increase reached 155%. Those who arrive in Germany later in life, without a recognized qualification or fluency in the language, have little chance in the labor market. For them, the welfare state is not a stopgap but a fixture, often for years at a stretch.

The trend extends to younger people as well. In the 15–24 age bracket, around 34,400 were long-term unemployed in 2025, up 65% since 2018. The increase among young Germans was 53%, while the number of young foreigners in this category doubled.

Bas's Statement Does Not Hold Up

A few months ago, Federal Labor Minister Bärbel Bas of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) told the Bundestag that immigration into the social welfare system simply did not happen. The Federal Employment Agency's new analysis puts that claim in a harsh light. Bas had also referred at the time to "mafia-like structures" behind social-benefit fraud committed by foreigners, but the figures now on the table have nothing to do with individual fraud cases. Instead, they point to long-term unemployment, a lack of qualifications and a welfare system increasingly shaped by migration.

Federal Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Bärbel Bas has rejected claims of large-scale immigration into Germany’s welfare system. Photo: Markus Lenhardt/dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images

For AfD social policy spokesman René Springer, the data amounts to a reckoning with a decade of migration policy. The federal government, he said, had brought an "army of permanently prospect-less people" into the country. He is calling for deportations alongside an activating basic-security system, arguing that long-term dependence on transfer payments should remain the exception, not the norm.