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| Germany needs skilled foreign professionals, but the AfD's rise is forcing Pakistanis to ask a different question: is Germany still the country where they want to build their future? |
A Doctor in Quedlinburg Made Me Stop Scrolling
I was reading the German election news in Karachi when one doctor made me stop scrolling. Ayman Alyoussef came to Germany from Syria in 2014, learned the language and eventually became a German citizen. He now works as a senior physician in Quedlinburg, yet he says he will leave when he feels hatred spreading around him.
Nobody has ordered him out. Nobody needs to.
Saxony-Anhalt votes on 6 September 2026, and the AfD enters the final days of the campaign with extraordinary support. One Infratest dimap poll puts the party at 42 percent, against 22 percent for the CDU. Seat arithmetic will depend partly on which smaller parties cross Germany's five-percent threshold, so 42 percent of the vote does not automatically give the AfD control of the state parliament.
I read those numbers differently from Karachi. Somewhere here, a young engineer may be studying German after returning from work, while a medical graduate searches for the rules governing recognition of a Pakistani qualification. Germany wants such people, but the young professional sitting with his phone in Karachi has a decision of his own to make.
He can go somewhere else.
The usual argument about the AfD therefore misses the more interesting problem. The question is not simply whether a future AfD government would deport skilled Pakistanis who live legally in Germany.
The harder question is whether Germany can still persuade them to come.
What the AfD Says, and What It Does Not Say
I do not want to manufacture a threat that the AfD itself does not formally claim to support. Its published position on "remigration" does not say that German citizens of Pakistani or Syrian origin should lose their citizenship because their parents came from somewhere else. The party says well-integrated citizens with migration backgrounds belong to German society, while its deportation demands focus heavily on foreigners who have no legal right to remain.
Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD's lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, has campaigned for aggressive deportation from the beginning of an AfD administration. His stated target concerns people required to leave Germany. Legal immigration under stricter rules remains a different category in the position he has presented.
A Pakistani doctor with German citizenship therefore should not read the Saxony-Anhalt campaign and conclude that a deportation order will arrive after an AfD victory. A Blue Card engineer and an international student also occupy legal categories that the rhetoric about illegal residence does not erase.
Several people commenting on the Quedlinburg story made exactly this point.
Work. Integrate.
The reassurance sounds simple until I imagine hearing it repeatedly as a Pakistani who plans to spend thirty years in Germany.
The argument then begins to change. A migrant may start asking not whether he can satisfy Germany's conditions today, but whether his right to feel at home will always come with an unwritten performance review attached.
Germany Has Had This Argument Before
Germany once wanted foreign workers without fully imagining foreign neighbours. During the postwar economic boom, West Germany recruited Gastarbeiter, guest workers, from countries including Turkey and Italy because factories needed labour. The word itself contained an assumption: a guest eventually goes home.
Many did not.
Factories had recruited workers, but workers arrived with lives that did not fit neatly inside an employment contract. Families followed, children grew up speaking German, and what policymakers had treated as temporary labour recruitment slowly became a question about permanent membership in German society.
Today's Pakistani professional enters a very different Germany. The Skilled Immigration Act has opened routes for qualified workers, while the EU Blue Card gives many highly skilled non-EU professionals a structured path into the German labour market. Germany now advertises abroad because demographic arithmetic has made immigration an economic requirement.
Yet an old tension has survived inside a new system.
Germany wants the worker. I am less certain that its politics has settled what happens when the worker becomes a neighbour and stays long enough for his children to call Germany home.
A Pakistani software engineer can understand that distinction without reading a book on German migration history. He hears it whenever somebody reassures him that foreigners who work hard and do not depend on welfare have "nothing to fear."
Nothing to fear, provided you remain the right kind of foreigner.
Pakistanis Are Already Listening
I went looking for Pakistani conversations about Germany because official immigration websites tell only half the story. In one 2026 discussion in the Pakistani migration community on Reddit, a person considering a master's degree in Germany said the AfD's rise had made him fearful. He was already thinking about German citizenship and permanent settlement, yet he was considering keeping another country as a backup.
Nobody had rejected his visa.
He had not even reached Germany, and German politics had already entered his calculation.
Other Pakistani discussions carry a harder tone. People who say they have spent years in Germany describe a difficult labour market and warn newcomers that German experience no longer guarantees an easy professional path. Political unease appears inside some of those conversations too, although individual Reddit accounts cannot tell me what Pakistanis in Germany think as a whole.
I treat those comments as voices, not statistics.
The stronger evidence comes from Germany's DeZIM Institute. In a survey of roughly 3,000 people, almost one in four respondents with a migration background said they had considered leaving Germany because of the AfD's rise. About 9 percent reported concrete plans to leave.
The state-level finding cuts closer to Saxony-Anhalt. If the AfD entered their state government, 33.8 percent of respondents with a migration background said they would consider moving to another German state. Some had moved beyond consideration and reported concrete plans.
No immigration officer needs to visit them.
They know where the railway station is.
Germany Is Not the Only Country on the Screen
I have watched migration calculations happen in Karachi. Someone unlocks a phone and converts a German salary into rupees. For a few seconds the figure looks magnificent, until somebody who has lived abroad starts subtracting rent and German taxes, and the excitement in the room becomes noticeably quieter.
Then comes the question that official recruitment portals cannot answer.
What will life actually be like?
For a skilled Pakistani, Germany does not compete against unemployment alone. An engineer working in Dubai may already have a decent salary and a familiar social environment. A younger professional in Karachi can spend months learning German, or he can investigate an English-speaking destination and accept a completely different set of costs.
Germany sometimes talks about skilled immigration as if qualified foreigners form a queue outside its gate.
The queue has smartphones.
A Pakistani doctor can research Britain before breakfast. By evening, she can be reading about German medical recognition. Her choice may still favour Germany because German hospitals need doctors and the country offers routes toward permanent settlement, but Germany is being interviewed too.
I think German migration politics often misses that reversal.
A country with a labour shortage cannot behave as though admission itself settles the bargaining relationship. Skilled workers bring scarce human capital, and the more portable their qualifications become, the easier it becomes for them to compare employers and countries.
Germany selects migrants.
Qualified migrants select Germany.
The second selection receives much less political attention.
How Long Must a "Good Foreigner" Remain Good?
One comment under the Quedlinburg story stayed with me: foreigners who work and do not live on German welfare have nothing to fear.
I understand the intended reassurance. A country has a legitimate interest in enforcing immigration law, and opposition to illegal migration does not automatically amount to hostility toward every foreigner.
But I want to ask something less comfortable.
When does an immigrant stop having to prove that he deserves to live among you?
Imagine a Pakistani engineer who arrives at thirty. He spends years learning German properly and pays into the tax system while building a career. Somewhere along the way his second child starts school, and the family buys an apartment.
Then the factory cuts his position.
A German colleague walks out of the same gate carrying the same termination letter. Nobody asks whether his unemployment has weakened his claim to Germany. The Pakistani may hear the event differently if political acceptance of migrants keeps returning to the language of economic contribution.
I am willing to say something more plainly.
If Germany welcomes a Pakistani mainly because he is economically useful, Germany has recruited labour. It has not necessarily accepted an immigrant.
Citizenship should eventually close much of that distance.
Alyoussef has German citizenship.
His passport has not changed, but he is still talking about leaving.
Saxony-Anhalt Cannot Ignore the Arithmetic
Saxony-Anhalt has a demographic problem that no campaign slogan can bargain with. The state had about 2.12 million residents at the end of 2025 and lost another 15,345 people during that year. Many smaller communities face the combined pressure of population loss and an ageing population.
Hospitals feel it directly.
Clinic director Matthias Voth said his hospital could not function without highly qualified colleagues of foreign origin. Remove enough of those people, and the debate stops being an argument about cultural identity and starts appearing on a hospital duty roster.
I can imagine the empty line on that roster more easily than a political slogan.
The AfD voter may answer that reducing immigration would also reduce demand for doctors. The arithmetic looks tidy until labour composition enters the calculation. A cardiologist and an ordinary patient are not interchangeable units in a population spreadsheet, especially in an ageing region that already struggles to recruit specialised medical staff.
A state can reduce population and still worsen its shortage of workers.
Germany's federal government understands part of the problem. Its skilled immigration reforms seek foreign workers because employers cannot fill enough positions domestically, while demographic ageing will push more Germans out of the labour force.
Political rhetoric operates on another timetable.
A Pakistani engineer considering Magdeburg does not wait for Germany's demographic projections to mature. He sees the election result next week. He reads what Germans say underneath the news report, asks somebody already living there what the atmosphere feels like, then returns to his browser.
One click is enough to change the destination.
The Economic Loss Can Happen Before the Law Changes
Chancellor Friedrich Merz has warned that an AfD victory in Saxony-Anhalt could discourage foreign investment. His concern makes economic sense because companies do not evaluate tax rates alone when choosing where to put factories and skilled employees.
People make similar calculations, but privately.
A multinational can issue a statement explaining why it selected another location. A Pakistani engineer does not owe Saxony-Anhalt a press release when he chooses Hamburg, and Germany may never know when he chooses another country entirely.
The loss therefore becomes difficult to count.
No deportation appears in the statistics because nobody was deported. No rejected visa appears because the Pakistani never applied. The hospital vacancy turns up years later, separated from the political moment that helped shape the original decision.
I find that more consequential than the exaggerated claim that an AfD government will immediately expel every foreign professional.
Fear does not need to become law before it acquires an economic cost.
The Question From Karachi
Germany still offers Pakistani professionals things worth taking seriously. Its universities remain attractive, while its ageing economy creates real demand for foreign skills. For people willing to learn German and work through a demanding recognition system, the country can offer a future that many cannot build as easily at home.
I would not tell a Pakistani student to abandon Germany because the AfD is polling at 42 percent in Saxony-Anhalt.
I would tell him to pay attention.
Not simply to AfD manifestos. I would listen to ordinary conversations about foreigners who already did what Germany asked of them, because those conversations reveal something an immigration portal cannot measure.
A few evenings ago, somebody in Karachi could have opened a German skilled-worker website and read that the country needs people with his qualifications. Today he can open another tab and read Germans debating which foreigners count as sufficiently integrated to have nothing to fear.
Both screens describe Germany.
Ayman Alyoussef arrived from Syria in 2014. Germany eventually gave him citizenship, and he built his professional life inside a hospital that says it depends on highly qualified foreign colleagues.
Now he talks about leaving if hatred spreads around him.
Somewhere in Karachi, a Pakistani professional has not bought his ticket yet.
He still has to choose a country.
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