There are not enough Germans to do the jobs Germany needs

Perhaps Friederich Merz thought he was being clever. The head of Germany’s main opposition party recently claimed on television that many of the 1m Ukrainians who flooded into Germany this year came not as refugees but as what he called “social tourists”, to take advantage of government benefits. He should have known better. Even his own Christian Democrats (CDU) said their leader had overstepped the mark. He was forced to apologise.

But this was not just a slip of political judgment. Whether Mr Merz likes it or not, Germany needs immigrants. It needs them urgently. Even as Russia’s energy squeeze pushes Europe’s largest economy towards recession, an acute labour shortage looms. A pair of surveys in the second quarter of this year illustrate the trend. The Institute for Employment Research, a government agency, estimated job vacancies in Germany at a record 1.93m, 66% more than last year. Meanwhile IFO, a think-tank in Munich, found that 49.7% of German companies cannot secure enough skilled workers, up from 30% in 2019 and the highest level since the surveys started in 2009.