Hardly any topic in Germany generates as many and often heated debates as integration. Does the integration of immigrants succeed? What are the conditions necessary for the merger to be successful? What are the biggest problems? Every two years, the Government's Integration Commissioner submits a comprehensive statistical report on this subject. The integration report covers a total of 14 areas, including education, health and housing, as well as income, language and racism.
Since last year 2025, Natalie Pavlik, a member of the German Parliament (Bundestag) for the Social Democratic Party, has been undertaking this task. On Wednesday (November 12, 2026) in Berlin, she gave an initially generally positive assessment, saying: “Integration is increasingly succeeding, although obstacles and challenges remain.”
“People in our country want integration to succeed,” Pavlik added. “They rightly expect people who live in Germany permanently to learn our language and abide by our laws.” Since it is particularly important in this regard for immigrants to start working as quickly as possible, the position of Integration Commissioner falls within the Federal Ministry of Labour.
A team led by Frank Kalter, Director of the German Center for Integration and Migration Research, prepared this report based on official government statistics, opinion polls and independent studies. The result: If we add all the groups together, about 30 percent of the population now has what can be described as a migration history, even if it is limited to only one parent. The vast majority of them, 81 percent, consider themselves part of Germany.
“This is an important message at a time when the problems of an allegedly failed merger are often talked about,” Pavlik commented. “The employment rate of migrants is approximately 70 percent, which is higher than in most other EU countries,” Kalter added.
They mainly work in one sector: “In recent years, we have seen a particularly strong growth in the number of workers who do not have German citizenship, especially in the health care and social services sectors.”
Accordingly, in 2009, about 1.8 million people who did not hold German citizenship were working in Germany, and by 2025 this number had more than tripled to reach 5.8 million people.
However there are also some problems. In almost all groups, women face difficulties in finding work, especially when the man in the family with children works. Only about 60 percent of women work in such families, while in families with German citizenship the percentage is about 88 percent.
Young people who arrived in Germany as refugees often face difficulties in accessing educational opportunities and the labor market. If we take only the German passport as a discriminatory criterion, the percentage of criminals who have been sentenced to final sentences in the category of people who do not hold such a document amounts to 40 percent, which is much higher than their share in the total population.
Studies show that willingness to report crimes is significantly higher among criminals who are perceived as immigrants. The number of young males among foreigners is greater, and they are the group most vulnerable to involvement in crime in all societies.
In this context, Pavlik emphasizes: The foundation and beginning of any successful integration is language learning. But in this particular area, at the beginning of the year, the government reduced the budget with the aim of saving. Many integration courses are no longer offered at all or have less government support.
The politician affiliated with the Social Democratic Party explained that this matter was met with severe criticism on her part, even if she herself was part of the federal government.
Recently, Pavlik's Social Democratic Party has been working to grant people, especially from Syria and Ukraine who have been working in Germany for a long time, safer residence permits.
On Tuesday, representatives of the Social Democratic Party approved a position paper in this regard. In it, they suggest that the residency rights stipulated in the law for workers should in the future apply to refugees as well. In other words: any refugee who works will have a safer status.
Will the conservatives in the Christian Democratic Party and the Bavarian Christian Social Party, the coalition led by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, support this proposal? "You have to ask the Minister of the Interior," Pavlik replied in response to a question from DW. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt is an advocate of a strict immigration policy.
