Germany's population will shrink more slowly than expected over the next 45 years thanks to high levels of immigration, the country's statistics office said on Tuesday.
Immigrants and asylum seekers, many of them from Syria, have brought net migration to its highest level in more than two decades, and fuelled an increasingly heated national debate.
But the government and industry say immigrants are badly needed to counter the looming demographic squeeze caused by an aging population.
Germany's population, which hit 81.1 million in 2014, will shrink to between 67.6 and 73.1 million in 2060, the statistics office said. The level of immigration will determine which end of that scale the population reaches.
Source: Reuters