page_title: Demographics of Germany
section_title: Ethnic minorities and migrant background (Migrationshintergrund)
hierarchical_section_title: Demographics of Germany / Ethnic minorities and migrant background (Migrationshintergrund)
caption_attribution_description: English: Janissary procession trough the Brandenburger Tor at the "Türkischen Tag" (Turkish Day) in Berlin Deutsch: Janitscharen-Umzug durch das Brandenburger Tor am "Türkischen Tag" in Berlin
context_page_description: The demography of Germany is monitored by the Statistisches Bundesamt. According to the first census since reunification, Germany's population was 80,219,695, making it the sixteenth-most populous country in the world and the most populous in the European Union. The total fertility rate was rated at 1.57 in 2018. In 2008, fertility was related to educational achievement. In 2011, this was no longer true for Eastern Germany, where more highly educated women now had a somewhat higher fertility rate than the rest of the population. Persons who said they had no religion tend to have fewer children than those who identify as Christians, and studies also found that conservative-leaning Christians had more children compared to liberal-leaning Christians.
  The United Nations Population Fund lists Germany as host to the third-highest number of international migrants worldwide, behind the United States and Saudi Arabia. More than 16 million people are descended from immigrants. 96.1% of those reside in western Germany and Berlin. About 7,000,000 of these 16,000,000 are foreign residents, defined as those without German citizenship.
context_section_description: The Federal Statistical Office defines persons with a migrant background as all persons who migrated to the present area of the Federal Republic of Germany after 1949, plus all foreign nationals born in Germany and all persons born in Germany as German nationals with at least one parent who migrated to Germany or was born in Germany as a foreign national. The figures presented here are based on this definition only.
  In 2010, 2.3 million families with children under 18 years were living in Germany, in which at least one parent had foreign roots. They represented 29% of the total of 8.1 million families with minor children. Compared with 2005 – the year when the microcensus started to collect detailed information on the population with a migrant background – the proportion of migrant families has risen by 2 percentage points. In 2015, 36% children under 5 years old had migrant background.(number includes ethnic German repatriates)
  Most of the families with a migrant background live in the western part of Germany. In 2010, the proportion of migrant families in all families was 32% in the former territory of the Federal Republic. This figure was more than double that in the new Länder (incl. Berlin) where it stood at 15%.
  Families with a migrant background more often have three or more minor children in the household than families without a migrant background. In 2010, about 15% of the families with a migrant background contained three or more minor children, as compared with just 9% of the families without a migrant background.
  In 2009, 3.0 million of the persons of immigrant background had Turkish roots, 2.9 million had their roots in the successor states of the Soviet Union (including a large number of Russian-speaking ethnic Germans), 1.5 million had their roots in the successor states of Yugoslavia including 200.000 Albanians and 1.5 million had Polish roots.
  In 2008, 18.4% of Germans of any age group and 30% of German children had at least one parent born abroad. Median age for Germans with at least one parent born abroad was 33.8 years, while that for Germans, who had two parents born in Germany was 44.6 years.
  Germany is home to the third-highest number of international migrants worldwide after the United States and Saudi Arabia.
  As of 2017, the population by background was as follows:
  Four other sizable groups of people are referred to as "national minorities" (nationale Minderheiten) because they have lived in their respective regions for centuries: Danes, Frisians, Roma and Sinti, and Sorbs. There is a Danish minority (about 50,000, according to government sources) in the northern-most state of Schleswig-Holstein. Eastern and Northern Frisians live at Schleswig-Holstein's western coast, and in the north-western part of Lower Saxony. They are part of a wider community (Frisia) stretching from Germany to the northern Netherlands. The Sorbs, a Slavic people with about 60,000 members (according to government sources), are in the Lusatia region of Saxony and Brandenburg. They are the last remnants of the Slavs that lived in central and eastern Germany since the 7th century to have kept their traditions and not been completely integrated into the wider German nation.
  Until World War II the Poles were recognized as one of the national minorities. In 1924 the Union of Poles in Germany had initiated cooperation between all national minorities in Germany under the umbrella organization Association of National Minorities in Germany. Some of the union members wanted the Polish communities in easternmost Germany (now Poland) to join the newly established Polish nation after World War I. Even before the German invasion of Poland, leading anti-Nazi members of the Polish minority were deported to concentration camps; some were executed at the Piaśnica murder site. Minority rights for Poles in Germany were revoked by Hermann Göring's World War II decree of 27 February 1940, and their property was confiscated.
  After the war ended, the German government did not re-implement national minority rights for ethnic Poles.  The reason for 
caption: Turkish parade in Berlin
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