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Germany hosts a significant immigrant population, whose composition is a result of its recruitment policy in the sixties in various countries of southern Europe. It is also due to the massive arrival of ethnic Germans emigrating from former populating areas in Eastern Europe. Since that time, no real politics of integration has been conducted. Those immigrants have been left to their own devices, with disastrous results in terms of vocational training and integration into the labour market. The unemployment rate of immigrants is double that of Germans and, if they succeed in finding a job, their wages are often low. Today the situation is notably different. With a birth rate under 1.4 children per woman for over thirty, Germany can no longer ignore this immigrant population that, including their descendants, numbers almost 15 million. That is why a couple of years ago, the federal government and the regions, as well as employers, employees and immigrants associations forged a significant pact designed to improve the mechanisms which integrate immigrants. This paper examines the various barriers to immigrants in the German labour market and the remedial measures that have been undertaken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Germany has one of the highest immigrant populations in Europe. But for several decades, immigrants were simply ignored. It was only a very low birth rate, fear of a significant decrease in the number of workers in the future, and its concomitant peril for the economy which made the government change its mind about immigration. First, it introduced legislation aimed at integrating the immigrants who were already living in Germany. But knowing that immigrants from other European countries, in particular from the East or the South, would not sufficiently compensate the labour deficit in Germany, the government launched several initiatives intended to attract workers from overseas in the 1990s, notably in the high-technology sector where the lack of qualified workers was particularly severe. These half-hearted reforms may indeed suffer due the economic crisis and the removal of immigration restrictions for Romanians and Bulgarians in 2014. And because of the great gap in living conditions between Germany and these two countries, Germans now fear both a wave of poverty immigration and increased clamouring for state benefits. In spite of the dire need for more immigrants and the now borderless European Union, many are now calling for immigration restraint once again. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]