Worldwide Demographics

[iheartthed]

Lisbon was affordable just a few years ago but the techbros discovered it.

[New Brisavoine]

Eventually, the locals will be chasing the invaders with forks. It's already happening in Barcelona.

[wwmiv]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

Eventually, the locals will be chasing the invaders with forks. It's already happening in Barcelona.

This is likely inevitable in every western country.

[Docere]

Speaking of the problem of overtourism, the head of the Prado recently expressed concern about it becoming like a Metro station and becoming a victim of its own success like the Louvre.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/15/prado-director-madrid-art-museum-visitors

[New Brisavoine]

Articles in Die Welt and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reveal that more and more wealthy and highly skilled German people are leaving the country and going to Switzerland, the US, and the UK (that last one is odd... they still haven't had the memo that the British economy is in deep shite).

According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, last year, 97,000 Germans left Germany, the highest figure ever (at least since 1949), driven by young graduates weary, according to economist Stefan Kolev, of the German state's "price-to-service ratio" (i.e. taxes too high, and public services too low for the amount of taxes paid). At the same time, Germany is losing its appeal among EU citizens, with the net migration remaining positive only thanks to non-EU immigrants.

According to Die Welt, 54% of German households earning more than 6,000 euros per month (83,350 USD per year) have inquired about emigration. The favorite destinations are: Switzerland, US, UK.

Germany seems to be back to where it was in the early 2000s...

https://www.courrierinternational.com/ar...mands-les-plus-aises-s-expatrient_255754

[mhays]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

According to Die Welt, 54% of German households earning more than 6,000 euros per month (83,350 USD per year) have inquired about emigration.

This doesn't sound true. Maybe an example of a reporter misunderstanding a statistic? It's extremely common in the media.

For example, maybe 54% of inquiries have been from people earning more than that.

Or maybe people are getting counted multiple times, once per log in.

Or it's people self-reporting that they've "looked into" emigration at some point without actually being serious. (Being American, I find this extremely common.)

If it's true, then it's probably counting people who only look out of curiosity rather than intent, much like it's common to peruse residential real estate listings for fun.

[Crawford]

Germans can't just pick up and move to any of these countries, so the stat sounds misleading or wrong.

Switzerland is a common tax dodge, but nothing has changed re. the relative tax rates between the two, U.S. is openly hostile to new immigrants now, even skilled, wealthy immigrants (hopefully just two more years of this hell), and Germans have never migrated in large numbers to UK.

Even the UK's economic bedrock, finance, has limited appeal, given Germany has Frankfurt. And, unlike Switzerland and the U.S., Germany feels much wealthier than the UK, with bigger, better homes, nicer cars, more abundant consumer goods and like. It feels like a step down.

[Docere]

Indeed, the "born in Germany" numbers in the UK are misleading. Many are actually those born to British military personnel living there.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Even the UK's economic bedrock, finance, has limited appeal, given Germany has Frankfurt. And, unlike Switzerland and the U.S., Germany feels much wealthier than the UK, with bigger, better homes, nicer cars, more abundant consumer goods and like. It feels like a step down.

In the UK, you see lots of young Europeans who come including from richer countries than the UK. I've never quite understood what was the appeal. Perhaps they were naive and believed what they saw on TV or all the hype about Britain in the media, and imagined it was a sort of America but more accessible than America. Or they just wanted an experience abroad, to relieve them from the boredom of life at home, and they were too lame to learn another language than English, so went to the UK.

But it's always a bit weird to see young Italians or Germans in places like, say, Middlesbrough, or Sheffield, which, if we're being honest, are quite ugly places, with an ugly weather, and not in places like Nice or Montpellier which afford 10 times more sunshine, nicer surroundings, and economies actually not worse than the English rustbelt. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact English is now the default foreign language learned in European schools, and these kids are too lazy to learn another language to take advantage of all the other countries in Europe.

[New Brisavoine]

Anyway, I've had a look at German stats. The 97,000 figure referred to in the media is not the number of Germans who left Germany, but it's the net migration of Germans. The numbers who left is much higher.

In 2025, 288,579 German citizens left Germany and only 191,890 German citizens returned to Germany, so the net migration was -96,689 (that's the number referred to in the media), significantly higher than the 7 previous years, whose average was -64,065 per year.

These 288,579 German citizens who left Germany in 2025 migrated to:
- unknown destination: 137,871
- Switzerland: 22,730
- Austria: 13,549
- Spain: 9,676
- United States: 8,860
- France: 5,748
- Turkey: 5,371
- Poland: 4,942
- United Kingdom: 4,444
- Italy: 3,735
- Netherlands: 3,600
- United Arab Emirates: 3,410
- Russia: 3,306
- Denmark: 3,120
- Australia: 3,087
etc.

So the UK was definitely not one of the top 3 destinations.

The number of German citizens departing for the UK peaked at 10,706 in 2008, then remained between 8,000 and 10,000 until 2016, then by 2017 it fell bellow 7,000, then bellow 5,000 in 2020, and has remained between 4,000 and 5,000 per year since 2020.

Departures to Switzerland peaked around 2009, then declined in the 2010s, but since 2022 they have increased a lot, jumping from 17,000 in 2021 to 20,000 in 2022, 21,000 in 2023, almost 23,000 in 2025.

Departures to Spain have also increased a lot since 2022.

Departures to the USA have plummeted since 2016 (I wonder why ). They were at 13,477 per year on average between 2000 and 2016, then they fell to 10,271 per year between 2017 and 2019, then since 2020 they've been at 8,530 per year.

[Crawford]

The UK has English, and London. I assume those are its two biggest advantages. Also it was "cool" for a pretty long period, maybe from Thatcher years through Brexit. And Brits tend to be friendly. Germany will never be "cool" and the people aren't friendly.

I get the appeal if you're coming from Portugal or Serbia, but to me, the UK feels like one of the "poorest" of the "rich" Western European countries. Homes are small and drafty, towns are grim. And it doesn't have good food or much scenery. Only the Dutch have worse food and less interesting scenery, but their towns are much nicer than in the UK.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Crawford

The UK has English, and London. I assume those are its two biggest advantages. Also it was "cool" for a pretty long period, maybe from Thatcher years through Brexit. And Brits tend to be friendly. Germany will never be "cool" and the people aren't friendly.

Problem with this theory is:
a- young Europeans are found all across England, even in improbable places like rustbelt towns in Northern England that no one has ever heard about

b- there are other friendly people in Europe, more friendly than the English.

[mhays]

London has great food because it's a major immigration haven and it's full of people who've traveled and have higher expectations. I've eaten very well there. It's changed quite a bit since 1989 when I first visited.

[Docere]

It seems to me that the British were too focused on promoting London and let the "regions" decline. To what extent did promoting London as a global capital of finance and culture come at their expense?

The new PM, Andy Burnham, wants to decentralize power from London and empower the regions. What becomes of that remains to be seen.

[Crawford]

True about London, but then there's the rest of the UK. France, Spain and Italy are legendary culinary destinations, with distinct provincial cuisines shifting every 50km or so. British food is mostly a pan-national slog of boiled —. And even London is no Paris, esp. when it comes to groceries and fresh foods. London is mostly strong for intl. business and high-end meals.

[New Brisavoine]

In London in the space of just a year and a half of buying food at local supermarkets, I had at least 2 cases that I can remember of food that turned out to be rotten and that I had to return to the supermarket. In France, in 20 years, that happened only once.

[fern]

American men like Sony , French favor Yamaha, Brits prefer Bose.
But those are just stereo types.
Far be it from me too push back against some of our esteemed forumers here. The one about our weather is ,due to climate change becoming less and less true.
Who knows? in the near future we could become a haven for climate refugees from southern French

[New Brisavoine]

New population projections by Eurostat.

This is the population they forecast by 2060:
- Germany: 78,505,000
- France: 70,263,000
- Spain: 53,468,000
- Italy: 52,829,000
- Poland: 31,151,000
- Netherlands: 19,136,000
- Romania: 16,334,000

Of note: their population projection for France is already wrong (underestimated) for 2026, because they haven't integrated the rising net migration in France since 2022 (they've based their projection on the lower immigration figures pre-2022). As of 2026, they forecast a population of just 69,057,000 in France, but in fact the population is already ca. 69.4 million (we will have more details in December when they publish the new census figures), which France wasn't expected to reach before the end of the 2020s (in Eurostat's latest projections).

Population projections by region:

[Yuri]

Sweden looks so wrong.

Long term estimates for such small areas are merely guessing anyway.

[mhays]

You can factor some things like past birth rates and recent migration, but so much depends on variables that are hard to predict a year out let alone 24.

For example birth rates might shift upward on a per-woman basis even while the number of women of age decreases. Immigration can shift up and down depending on policy, sometimes sharply if extremists get into power, affecting both arrivals, departures, and economic trends. Countries and cities can see economic fortunes go up or down for any number of reasons, even in the common market. Military conflicts and "cold war" situations have increased stress in some areas while causing buildups in others.