(THE LOCAL) – Last year saw the highest level of inward migration in German history. Thanks partly to the refugee influx, more than two million people moved to the Bundesrepublik in 2015.
Figures released by the government’s statistics agency (Destatis) on Thursday show that more than 2.1 million people migrated to Germany in 2015, an increase of 672,000 or 46 percent on the previous year.
It was also a bumper year for outward migration, with just under one million people packing their bags and saying auf Wiedersehen to the Bundesrepublik, a 9 percent increase on 2014.
Overall Germany received a boost of more than 1.1 million people to its population through migration – a new historical record.
The overwhelming majority (94 percent) of those who moved to Germany were foreigners, rather than Germans moving back home. Of the 998,000 who left Germany in 2015, 859,000 held foreign passports.