The demography of Germany is monitored by the Statistisches Bundesamt. According to the most recent data, Germany's population is 84,432,670 making it the most populous country in the European Union and the nineteenth-most populous country in the world. The total fertility rate was rated at 1.58 in 2021, significantly below the replacement rate of 2.1. For a long time Germany had one of the world's lowest fertility rates of around 1.3 to 1.4, however there has been a small increase in recent years. Due to the low birth rate Germany has recorded more deaths than births every year since 1972, which means 2021 was the 50th consecutive year the German population would have decreased without immigration. However, due to immigration the population has actually increased during the last half-century. In 2019 the number of people with a foreign background was 26%; this category includes foreigners, naturalized citizens, ethnic German repatriates from Eastern Europe and the children of all of the above.
The German minority population in Russia, Ukraine, and the Soviet Union stemmed from several sources and arrived in several waves. Since the second half of the 19th century, as a consequence of the Russification policies and compulsory military service in the Russian Empire, large groups of Germans from Russia emigrated to the Americas, where they founded many towns. In 1914, an estimate put the remaining number of ethnic Germans living in the Russian Empire at 2,416,290. While Stalin held power, ethnic German families were deported to gulag concentration camps located in Siberia and other parts of Central Asia, leading to the genocide of Germans from Russia. In 1989, the Soviet Union declared to have an ethnic German population of roughly 2 million. By 2002, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many ethnic Germans had emigrated and the population fell by half to roughly 1 million. 597,212 Germans self-identified as such in the 2002 Russian census, making Germans the fifth-largest ethnic group in the Russian Federation. There were 353,441 Germans in Kazakhstan and 21,472 in Kyrgyzstan (1999); while 33,300 Germans lived in Ukraine.
Emigration is the act of leaving a resident country or place of residence with the intent to settle elsewhere. Conversely, immigration describes the movement of people into one country from another. A migrant emigrates from their old country, and immigrates to their new country. Thus, both emigration and immigration describe migration, but from different countries' perspectives.
Israelis are the citizens and nationals of the State of Israel. The country's populace is composed primarily of Jews and Arabs, who respectively account for 75 percent and 20 percent of the national figure; followed by other ethnic and religious minorities, who account for 5 percent.
The history of the Jews in Russia and areas historically connected with it goes back at least 1,500 years. Jews in Russia have historically constituted a large religious and ethnic diaspora; the Russian Empire at one time hosted the largest population of Jews in the world. Within these territories, the primarily Ashkenazi Jewish communities of many different areas flourished and developed many of modern Judaism's most distinctive theological and cultural traditions, while also facing periods of antisemitic discriminatory policies and persecution, including violent pogroms. Some have described a "renaissance" in the Jewish community inside Russia since the beginning of the 21st century; however, the Russian Jewish population has experienced precipitous decline since the dissolution of the USSR which continues to this day, although it is still among the largest in Europe.
The Polish diaspora comprises Poles and people of Polish heritage or origin who live outside Poland. The Polish diaspora is also known in modern Polish as Polonia, the name for Poland in Latin and many Romance languages.
Immigration to Germany, both in the country's modern borders and the many political entities that preceded it, has occurred throughout the country's history. Today, Germany is one of the most popular destinations for immigrants in the world, with well over 1 million people moving there each year since 2013. As of 2019, around 13.7 million people living in Germany, or about 17% of the population, are first-generation immigrants.
Russian Americans are Americans of full or partial Russian ancestry. The term can apply to recent Russian immigrants to the United States, as well as to those who settled in the 19th century Russian possessions in northwestern America. Russian Americans comprise the largest Eastern European and East Slavic population in the U.S., the second-largest Slavic population generally, the nineteenth-largest ancestry group overall, and the eleventh-largest from Europe.
The Russian diaspora is the global community of ethnic Russians. The Russian-speaking (Russophone) diaspora are the people for whom Russian language is the native language, regardless of whether they are ethnic Russians or not.
The 1970s Soviet Union aliyah was the mass immigration of Soviet Jews to Israel after the Soviet Union lifted its ban on Jewish refusenik emigration in 1971. More than 150,000 Soviet Jews immigrated during this period, motivated variously by religious or ideological aspiration, economic opportunity, and a desire to escape anti-Semitic discrimination.
The population of Armenia includes various significant minority ethnic groups.
The 1990s post-Soviet aliyah began en masse in the late 1980s when the government of Mikhail Gorbachev opened the borders of the Soviet Union and allowed Jews to leave the country for Israel.
The Albanians in Germany refers to the Albanian migrants in Germany and their descendants. They mostly trace their origins to Albania, Kosovo and to a lesser extent to North Macedonia and other Albanian-speaking territories in the Balkan Peninsula. Their exact number is difficult to determine as some ethnic Albanians hold German, Macedonian, Serbian or another Former Yugoslavian citizenship.
The Belarusian diaspora refers to emigrants from the territory of Belarus as well as to their descendants.
Azerbaijan though not a popular destination for immigrants, has recently experienced waves of immigration with the collapse of the Soviet Union, especially from ethnic Azerbaijanis mostly from Armenia, Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union. Meskhetian Turks were also relocated to Azerbaijan from Central Asia before and after the end of the Soviet Union. With the booming petroleum industry, immigration from Turkey has also followed. In 2010, every eighth resident in Azerbaijan was a migrant, of whom more than 90% of them are Azerbaijanis and 70% are internally displaced persons from the territories occupied by Armenia.
The Russian language is spoken natively by a considerable proportion of the population of Israel, mostly by immigrants who came from the former Soviet Union from 1989 onwards. It is a major foreign language in the country, and is used in many aspects of life. Russian is the third most common native language in Israel after Modern Hebrew and Arabic. Government institutions and businesses often also provide information and services in Russian, and is has effectively become semi-official in some areas with high concentration of Russian-speaking immigrants. The Russian-speaking population of Israel is the world's third-largest population of Russian native-speakers living outside the former Soviet Union territories after Germany and the United States, and the highest as a proportion of the population. As of 2013, 1,231,003 residents of the Post-Soviet states have immigrated to Israel since the fall of the Soviet Union. As of 2017, there are up to 1.5 million Russian-speaking Israelis out of total population of 8,700,000 (17.25%).
This article delineates the issue of immigration in different countries.
Russians in Israel or Russian Israelis are post-Soviet Russian citizens who immigrate to Israel and their descendants. As of 2022, Russian-speakers number around 1,300,000 people, or 15% of the Israeli population. This number, however, also includes immigrants from the Soviet Union and post-Soviet states other than Russia proper.
Russian Jews in Israel are immigrants and descendants of the immigrants of the Russian Jewish communities, who now reside within the State of Israel. They were around 900,000 in 2007. This refers to all post-Soviet Jewish diaspora groups, not only Russian Jews, but also Mountain Jews, Crimean Karaites, Krymchaks, Bukharan Jews, and Georgian Jews.
Soviet Jews in America or American Soviet Jews are Jews from former Soviet Republics that have emigrated to the United States. The group consists of people that are Jewish by religion, ethnicity, culture, or nationality, that have been influenced by their collective experiences in the Soviet Union. In the 60s, there were around 2.3 million Jews in the USSR, as ethnicity was recorded in the census. Jews from the Soviet Union consisted mostly of the Ashkenazi sect, and emigrated in waves starting in the 1960s, with over 200,000 leaving in the 1970s. As of 2005, over 500,000 Jews had left Soviet Republics for the United States. American Soviet Jews are often covered by the blanket term, "Russian-speaking Jews", and are a self-selecting group, due to the barriers that people leaving the USSR had to face. Often-times, Soviet immigrants struggle with the abundance of choices that they can make in America, but after learning the language, have been shown to be as well-adjusted as other immigrant groups.
