Marrakech – Morocco stands as the fifth-largest country of origin for people who moved to Germany to study or train, according to new figures from Germany’s Federal Statistical Office. Roughly 37,000 Moroccans named education as their main reason for immigrating.
The number appears in a report published Monday in the office’s journal WISTA, drawn from results of the 2025 microcensus. The study examines the 16.4 million people who immigrated to Germany since 1950 and were still living there in 2025, plus 5.4 million descendants of two immigrant parents.
Across all education migrants, the report counts 924,000 people who reported moving to Germany for a course of study or for vocational and further training. Just over a fifth, or 21%, came from EU or EFTA states or the United Kingdom. The remaining 79% came from third countries.
Morocco sits within that larger third-country group, which the report puts at 733,000 people. India led the field with 98,000, followed by China with 77,000, Türkiye with 52,000, and Iran with 43,000. Morocco came next at 37,000.
Turning to who these migrants are, the report finds that men made up 55% of all education migrants and women 45%.
Three-quarters of the group belonged to the foreign population rather than holding German citizenship, a share the authors tie to the fact that “education as a migration motive tends to be temporary,” with many students leaving once their programs end and therefore not remaining long enough to naturalize.
The same pattern shows again in a comparatively short average length of stay of 14 years, well below the figures for longer-settled groups the report tracks.
For education migrants from third countries specifically, the average age was about 36, the average time spent in Germany was under 13 years, and roughly a quarter held German citizenship. The comparison points to a population that is younger and more recently arrived than several other immigrant groups the report tracks.
On method, the Federal Statistical Office built the education-migration category mainly from the migration motive, a question the microcensus has collected since 2017. It also folded in people who gave EU freedom of movement as their reason, came from EU or EFTA states or the United Kingdom, and had been in education during the 12 months before the survey.
The wider report sets out a way to divide immigrants into distinct subgroups by year of arrival, country of origin, and reason for moving. Its starting point is that treating immigrants as a single bloc risks hiding the specifics of individual populations. The immigrant population, the authors write, forms “a heterogeneous group that should be differentiated more strongly in analysis.”
That framing carries a direct implication for how Morocco figures in the data. Because Moroccans register mainly through the education route rather than through labor, family, or protection channels, their profile in Germany reads as younger, more temporary, and more tied to study than that of longer-established migrant communities.
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