July the 12th, 2024 – For the very first time in a decade, more Croats have left Germany than have moved there, showing a marked demographic shift.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, Milan returned home to Croatia after living and working in Germany for eleven years. He moved his family and construction company to his native town of Imotski, in the rugged Dalmatian hinterland.
“It’s definitely a final thing. I missed my homeland, Imotski, Zagreb… all of that so much, and I want to be there now. It isn’t necessarily that Croatia has improved so much, it’s more than Germany is collapsing. Salaries increased by 10 to 15 percent, but alongside that, everything became abnormally expensive,” stated Milan Katanušić for RTL.
Among the Croats in Germany not planning to return home is Marija from Zagreb, who has been living in Munich for a decade now and plans to stay there. In addition to having a good and secure job in finance, she and her colleagues also developed a mobile application (app) with advice for those moving to Germany.
“I finished college in Germany, started a family, started two businesses… If someone had asked me where I would be ten years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to say with certainty that it would be Germany,” stated Marija Šimić.
“There are still plenty of Croats in Germany, but many can’t live there with their average German pensions, so it’s a little easier for them to go back to Croatia at that point,” explained Katanušić.
For the first time in a decade, more Croats emigrated from Germany than immigrated
Last year, far fewer foreigners immigrated to Germany than in previous years, and the number of Croatian citizens who immigrated to Germany fell for the first time, the Federal Statistical Office announced. “Germany recorded a decline in the number of immigrants last year. While 2,665,772 foreigners arrived in Germany in 2022, last year that number stood at 1,932,509,” the Federal Statistical Office claimed in a statement.
At the same time, considering that 1,269,545 foreigners emigrated from Germany, the net number of immigrants fell to 662,964, which is a noticeable drop compared to 2022, when the net number of immigrants was 1,462,089.
This decline is primarily associated with the record number of refugees from Ukraine who immigrated to Germany back in 2022, and whose number dropped significantly in 2023.
For the first time since Croatia’s entry into the European Union (2013), in 2023, more Croats emigrated from Germany than immigrated to it. That means that last year, 20,604 Croats immigrated to Germany, which is the lowest number since 2013, when Croatia acquired full EU membership. Last year, 24,241 Croats emigrated from Germany, which means that in 2023, the number of Croats living in Germany dropped by a significant 3,637.
A total of 434,035 Croats were registered as living in Germany at the end of 2023. A few years earlier, in 2016, 332,605 Croats were registered in Germany.
