Migrants nudge Germany to highest birth rate since 1970s

Excerpt:

Germany recorded a bounce in the birth rate in 2016, official statistics showed Wednesday, hitting a 43-year high helped along by large numbers of recently-arrived migrants.

Some 792,131 children were born in Europe’s most populous nation in 2016, federal statistics authority Destatis said, an increase of 7.0 percent over the previous year.

While German women had some 3.0 percent more babies than in 2015, at 607,500, non-German births increased 25 percent, to 184,660.

“The number of women from countries with traditionally higher tendency to bear children increased” following a surge in migration in 2015-16, Destatis said.

Those years saw more than a million people arrive in Germany, many from conflict hotspots in the Middle East such as Syria and Iraq.

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