German health associations have warned that rising anti-Syrian rhetoric risks worsening staff shortages in hospitals, clinics and care homes in the EU’s largest nation.
Syrians are the largest group of foreign doctors working in Germany, with 16 per cent coming from the war-ravaged country, according to the German Medical Association.
But the toppling of former president Bashar al-Assad in 2024 has triggered a fraught political debate over their continued presence in Germany, which is home to Europe’s largest Syrian population.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who is under pressure from the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) to take a tougher stance on immigration, said in November that “there were no reasons” for Syrians to continue to be granted asylum in Germany. “There is no civil war anymore,” he added.
Merz said he hoped that many Syrians would return voluntarily to help rebuild their country, but he also left the door open to deportations.
That has alarmed health associations, including the German Medical Association, which told the Financial Times that “many clinics would experience serious bottlenecks” without Syrian doctors.
There is already a trend of doctors leaving the country, with 2,197 people emigrating in 2024, according to the association’s data. Of those, 41 per cent were non-German citizens.
The care sector faces some of the most acute skilled-worker shortages and will need to recruit at least 280,000 additional staff by 2049.
Isabell Halletz, managing director of the Employers’ Association for Nursing Care, said an exodus of Syrians from the sector would “be a blow to securing skilled workers in the future”.
With Germany’s population ageing, she warned that losing Syrian workers would lead to people in need being neglected. “We assume that people would then be left without care or would have to wait for several weeks or months.”
Germany became Europe’s largest host of people fleeing Syria after then chancellor Angela Merkel opened the door to about 1mn asylum seekers in 2015. Today, about 972,000 Syrian nationals live in the country, of whom roughly 712,000 are asylum seekers, according to the latest official figures from 2023.
A refugee arriving at Munich central station in 2015 carrying an image of Angela Merkel. The then chancellor opened the door to about 1mn asylum seekers © Sven Hoppe/EPA
Their presence has helped fuel rising support for the anti-immigrant AfD, which came second in the 2025 parliamentary elections with a record 21 per cent of the vote. The party has seized upon deadly knife attacks carried out by migrants, including Syrians, and has criticised the high share of refugees claiming benefits.
About 55 per cent of the Syrian nationals living in Germany received benefits in 2024 — down from more than 80 per cent in 2018. As of May, about 300,000 Syrians were actively employed.
Of these, more than 80,000 Syrians work in sectors where the country faces shortages as it grapples with an ageing population and a shrinking workforce, according to the Cologne-based German Economic Institute (IW). The proportion of people aged over 67 is projected to reach one in four by 2035.
Syrians’ contribution to “society as a whole” is a “crucial” part of the demographic challenges, said Lydia Malin, a senior economist at IW. Syrians work in service sectors that will be sorely needed in future “to care for our parents or look after our children”, she said.
Malin said about a third of Germany’s 1mn Syrians were children at school, adding: “If we send all the women and minors we have in the country back home now because they cannot yet provide for themselves, then we will lose exactly the potential that we will need in 10 or 15 years.”
The bottlenecks extend beyond healthcare. Among those training to work in skilled trades, such as builders, electricians and cleaners, Syrian workers are the biggest group without a German passport, making up 17 per cent, according to data provided by the German Confederation of Skilled Crafts and Small Businesses (ZDH).
“Given the demographic trend of fewer young people entering the workforce each year, this potential is more important than ever for the skilled trades,” said ZDH’s managing director, Karl-Sebastian Schulte.
The latest debate over the future of Syrians in Germany was prompted by foreign minister Johann Wadephul’s visit to Syria in October. While touring Harasta, a town near Damascus, he said that “hardly anyone can live a dignified life here”, casting doubt on the prospect of refugees returning.
The comments caused unease within Merz’s Christian Democrats, of which Wadephul is a member, as the party was seeking a tougher stance on migration to fend off the AfD. The chancellor ultimately chose to publicly contradict his own minister, insisting that there were no reasons for Syrians not to return home.
In December, Germany deported a convicted Syrian criminal for the first time since Syria’s civil war began in 2011, following a new agreement with Syria’s transitional government to allow the removal of high-risk offenders.
According to official data, some 88 per cent of Syrian refugees have a humanitarian residence permit that grants them protected status. Thomas Oberhäuser, chair of the German Bar Association’s committee on migration law, said they could not easily be deported until safe return conditions were met.
“It is upsetting because so many people who are integrated well . . . are being told ‘get out’, even though practically it doesn’t work that way,” Oberhäuser said. “Legally it is super-complicated and from an integration policy standpoint it is nonsense.”
Leena Albarazi: ‘I don’t want my daughter, who was born here and now only knows Germany, to experience [discrimination] at school or in kindergarten’ © Thomas Dashuber/FT
Merz, meanwhile, has softened his stance, saying in December that “we need immigration [for the] whole medical sector, nursing sector and other areas”. But, he stressed, “those who want to live in our country must abide by the rules. And if they don’t, they must leave.”
Still, the tone of the political debate has made some highly skilled Syrians think twice about staying in Germany.
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Leena Albarazi, a GP in the small Bavarian town of Pfarrkirchen, fled Damascus in 2014. She has a German passport and feels “at home” in the country. But she would still consider leaving “soon” if the situation “escalated even more”, she said.
“I don’t want my daughter, who was born here and now only knows Germany, to experience [discrimination] at school or in kindergarten,” she said.
Many of her colleagues had already moved or were planning to do so, she said, “either back to Syria, or simply elsewhere to Canada or Saudi Arabia”.
Zakaria Hawoot, a senior neurologist and chair of the Syrian German Medical Association, said: “We are now fighting to make Germany better . . . But there is a limit.
“If there comes a time where we can’t change things anymore, then we could use our strength to do something else in other countries.”