Eastern Europeans are increasingly filling new jobs created in Germany, according to government data.

More than half of the new jobs in the country are being filled by foreigners, with Eastern Europeans figuring more prominently than other groups.

From the 700,000 new jobs created in Germany in the year prior to July 2018, only 330,000 were filled by Germans, and 370,000 were taken by foreigners, according to the Federal Employment Agency (BA), the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitungreported, as cited by DW.

At present, there are about 1.5 million registered employees from Eastern Europe working in Germany, meaning employees who make full social insurance contributions, including payroll taxes and for pensions.

The figure includes 420,000 people from EU member state Poland and 350,000 from EU member state Romania.

Their numbers alone are higher than those of the registered workers from four southern EU member states, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, whose combined total is about 615,000.

A total of 327,000 refugees are also registered as officially employed in Germany, whose aging population means Europe’s largest economy is increasingly relying on foreign workers.

“Without free movement enjoyed by workers in Europe, we would be put in much more of a tight spot for certain occupations,” Labor Minister Hubertus Heil said, while lauding recent amendments to Germany’s immigration law.

“The law represents huge social and economic progress that no one can roll back,” he said.

The updated immigration law would, among other things, rank non-EU immigrants according to level of education, age, language skills, job offers and financial security.

That is supposed to help attract skilled workers to maintain the competitiveness of the German economy.

One controversy over the immigration law is a special exemption sought by the Social Democrats for refugees whose asylum applications have been rejected but who are already well integrated in the German society.

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