Nation’s population is growing again although longer-term trends still point to a decline – and the need for continued high levels of immigration

Germany’s population is no longer shrinking. Four consecutive years of increasingly high net migration have outpaced the country’s birth deficit, taking the country’s population to nearly 82 million people – a level last seen in 2009.

The population growth has been particularly concentrated among those of working age. The number of people employed in Germany hit 43 million in 2015, according to data released by Destatis, the German statistics office, on Tuesday. The figure represents the highest number of people in work since German reunification. Meanwhile, the number of unemployed people has dropped below 2 million for the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Over the past 12 months the active labour force (the total number of people in employment and unemployed) has increased to 44.9 million, driven by higher labour force participation of the domestic population and the immigration of foreign workers, which has offset negative demographic effects.

Net migration has exceeded 300,000 every year since 2011, hitting 676,730 in 2014, according to data published by Germany’s federal office for migration and refugees.

Zuzüge = arrivals; fortzüge = departures, wanderungssaldo = net migration, ausländer gesamt = totals, staatsangehörige aus Nicht-EU-Staaten = non-EU nationals

By contrast, in 2014 for example, 714,927 births and 868,373 deaths were recorded.

The most recent estimate, released in April last year, puts the country’s population at 81.3 million, compared with 80.2 million in 2011.

The trend is likely to continue, in the short term at least. Net migration in the first six months of 2015 was 435,366, a 53.7% increase compared with the first six months of 2014 on the back of Angela Merkel’s refugee policy.

However, long-term projections still forecast Germany’s population to decline to 73.1m by 2060 due to a growing birth deficit after 2020 that cannot be compensated even by net immigration levels of 200-300,000 people.

Longer-term forecasts are nevertheless complicated because they are dependent on factors such as future migration levels (which for the past four years have exceeded the higher end of the current forecast’s underlying assumptions), the age structure of migrants and birth rates of what demographically, in Germany’s case, is a rapidly and dramatically changing population.

Last year, the country registered the arrival of 1 million asylum seekers, the near entirety of whom were under 65 and of working age.

Nevertheless, whether to restrict the number of arrivals remains a point of debate despite public and business support for Merkel’s stance on refugees, and backing by her party, the CDU. At last month’s congress, only two of the party’s 1,001 delegates voted against her decision not to put a ceiling on the number of refugees to welcome.

In her annual new year’s address, Merkel urged Germans to see refugee arrivals as an opportunity.