Now it's the Germans who are Running Away

...from Germany, that is.

Joe Noory, the holder of the Feline Theocracy's coveted Cardinal Richelieu Chair for Advanced European Studies, has posted this fascinating bit about educated Germans fleeing Germany.

Last year more than 155,000 Germans emigrated from their native country. Since 2004 the number of ethnic Germans who leave each year is greater than the number of immigrants moving in. While the emigrants are highly motivated and well educated, "those coming in are mostly poor, untrained and hardly educated," says Stephanie Wahl of the German Institute for Economics.

Let's do some quick, back-of-the-envelope calculations on this. First, we assume a 1600 hour work year for Germans. Where I work, we use 1750 hours per year. The Europeans, being European, work less. Let's also assume that these educated Germans would earn, say $30 an hour. That's an annual salary of $48K. They're being replaced by manual laborers from North Africa and the Middle East. Let's assume a $10 per hour wage for them. That's a $20 per hour difference.

Over a 1600 hour year, that's a loss of $32,000 per person for Germany. Multiply that by 155,000 and you get a loss of $4.96B per year. The World Fact Book tells us the population of Germany is 82,400,996. Dividing gives us a per capita income loss of about $60 per year for the country. That same Fact Book tells us that the German per capita income is $31,400. A $60 loss is a 0.2% drop in per capita income. Their growth rate is 2.2%. That means that a single year's loss of skilled, young Germans drops their growth rate by about 10%.

It's cumulative, too. Those 155,000 Germans who left in 2006 won't be coming back. The 155,000 who leave in 2007 will add up to 310,000 who have left. In 2008, another 155,000 will leave making a total of 465,000 Germans who have bailed out. Who's going to be left to pay for that welfare state ten years from now?