Labor agency chief says Germany needs more immigrants

BERLIN (AP) — The head of Germany’s national labor agency says the country needs significantly more immigrants to plug gaps in the work force as the population ages. The chairman of the Federal Labor Agency said in Tuesday’s edition of the daily newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung that he expects the number of working-age people in Europe’s biggest economy to decline by nearly 150,000 this year and more dramatically in the coming years. He says Germany needs 400,000 immigrants per year to prevent labor shortages. Germany has 83 million inhabitants. Last year, the number of foreign nationals living in the country grew by about 204,000, the smallest increase in a decade.