Cover image: symbolic image, “The Parting Cheer” (1861) by Henry Nelson O’Neil, emigrants bidding farewell at the harbour. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (Royal Museums Greenwich).
Political Feuilleton. English translation of the German original, “Der stille Aderlass”.
Introduction
The debate about migration in Germany usually revolves around the question of who may enter the country and who has to leave it. What is entirely overlooked is a quiet but momentous trend: more and more highly qualified citizens with a migration background are voluntarily turning their backs on Germany. Driven by discrimination in the labor market and a palpable sense of social alienation, these sought-after professionals are looking for their future abroad. Maryam Hübsch reports in the Political Feuilleton on this underestimated drain and on the question of why belonging in Germany is still tied to conditions.
You can leave a country without being deported. More and more people in Germany are doing exactly that – not because they are forced to, but because they no longer want to stay. And they are not the people whose “remigration” the AfD whispers about, but the sought-after ones: well educated, multilingual, mobile, courted all over the world.
“Should I emigrate?” – there is hardly a panel at which I am not asked this question from the audience. Among the people around me, especially young Muslims, it has long been a constant topic.
The impression can be backed up with figures. According to a short study by the DeZIM Institute from early 2026, 21 percent of all people in Germany consider emigrating – among immigrants it is 34 percent, and among their children born here as many as 37 percent, more than twice as many as in the population without a migration history. People with family roots in Turkey and the Arab world most often think about leaving. Shortly before the federal election in February 2025, this figure rose by around ten points among immigrants. While the public argues about immigration, around a million people a year leave the country – almost unnoticed.
The reasons are well known: housing costs, shaky career prospects, a sluggish economy – and the rise of right-wing populists. But for people with a migration history there is something more, which no economic upturn can cure. In surveys, it is precisely those born here who cite the experience of being treated differently. The first official report of the Independent Expert Group on Muslim Hostility (Expertenkreis Muslimfeindlichkeit) noted soberly in 2023 that roughly every second person in Germany agrees with anti-Muslim statements – a figure that has hardly moved in twenty years. That is not the fringe. That is the center.
It is therefore not the breaking of abstract rules that alienates people, but the experience of belonging in one’s own country only on condition.
How this plays out in everyday life was demonstrated by the economist Doris Weichselbaumer in a much-cited field experiment: the same application, the same photo, only the name varied. “Sandra Bauer” was invited to an interview in just under 19 percent of cases, “Yasmin Öztürk” in 13.5 – and if Yasmin wore a headscarf, in a good 4 percent. For the same job she has to write four and a half times as many applications; for more demanding jobs the factor rises to more than seven. You can be born here, educated here, excellently qualified – and still be screened out.
On top of that comes a climate that many read as a message. When a secret meeting near Potsdam at which “remigration” had been discussed became public in early 2024, millions of citizens with a migration history heard one sentence: you are not welcome. Research on the so-called roots migration of academics of Turkish descent has shown for years that the strongest reason for leaving is not the labor market but a missing sense of home – the experience of being treated as a permanent guest despite a German passport. Belonging, the signal goes, remains tied to conditions.
So where to? Many are drawn to Turkey – not out of nostalgia, but because they are in demand there as multilingual professionals, because more than 2,000 German companies build bridges, and because, as one returnee put it, you are “simply yourself” instead of a diagnosis. Others are drawn to the economic hubs of the Gulf – Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha – where tax-free incomes and cosmopolitan careers beckon and nobody has to explain why they pray or wear a headscarf. That these states are governed authoritarianly is something some are willing to accept – a telling price. The larger, broadly qualified group, however, disperses less spectacularly: to Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and North America – to places where performance counts and origin counts for less.
This reverses the narrative of “uncontrolled immigration”: those leaving are not the ones nobody wants, but the ones every aging country should be fighting to keep. Migration researchers warn that this drain cannot be compensated by immigration alone. A country that debates deportations while its most sought-after people quietly look elsewhere should ask itself less how to keep people out – and more why belonging here is still a question of names, photos and prayer.