Around 350,000 migrants will receive unemployment benefits this year, Germany’s Federal Employment Agency has said.

Detlef Scheele, a member of the agency’s governing board, admitted that those aged over 35 do not have a good chance of qualifying for a well-paid job, while the process of integrating migrants into the country’s job market will be slow.

He told Süddeutsche Zeitung that “we should not have too high expectations” that migrants will find work, admitting the majority will remain unemployed for at least five years after entering the country: “If things go well, maybe ten percent in the first year after entry will have a job, after five years, half, after 15 years 70 percent.”

The majority of migrants cannot compete with the average German worker for jobs, he added, with unemployed locals having the natural advantage of speaking German as a native language.

His prediction comes as the Cologne Institute for Economic Research says government spending on migrants will hit 22 billion euros this year and almost 50 billion euros by the end of 2017. The cost of food and accommodation for 1.5 million migrants this year alone will be 17 billion euros, according to the Rheinische Post, with another five billion needed for language and integration courses.

The huge costs will mean the German government will likely have to find billions of euros of savings elsewhere. In September, Breitbart London reported that Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble was planning a “mini-austerity” to raise money to deal with the migrant influx.

He told the German parliament that he did not want to create any new debt, although dealing with the migrant crisis remained a “top priority”. The only way to do this would be for every government department to make cutbacks, he added.

In October, the Federal Employment Agency said that 81 per cent of the migrants entering Germany were unskilled and many would have to go straight onto state unemployment benefits.

Leaked documents showed the agency predicted 400,000 migrants would have to receive benefits in 2016, in line with Mr Scheele’s comments.

However, the agency still claimed mass immigration was good news for Germany and indeed for itself, with the huge number of new benefits applications that need processing meaning it needs some 3,500 new staff.

Many of these new employees will themselves be migrants, with the agency listing the example of ‘Abdoulaye N.’ who works as a “mediation specialist” in Dortmund helping fellow migrants access benefits.

Breitbart London approached the federal agency in October, but they would not comment on how the document was leaked, insisting simply that the information was “not secret”.