What about all the other immigrants from EU or abroad whose higher education was not paid by Germany and they immigrate to Germany? Surely that is a positive. Germany is benefiting from paid-by-somebody-else qualified applicants.
The latter isn't really a requirement, at least when working in tech. I barely speak any German at all in my job, and I'm a German dude working at a German company. All companies I worked for since 2010 had English as "company language", and immigrants were in the majority (mostly from other European countries, but also US and Canada).
I know many engineers etc. working as taxi drivers or dish washers because their (excellent!) degree gets not accepted in DE.
At the same time industry is whining about "fachkräftemangel" - this could be a solved problem tomorrow if politics did not try to block immigrants wherever possible.
According to the chart in the article, the employment rate looks like 56-57% for men and just under 30% for women.
To be as generous to this hypothesis as possible, we'll say 57% for men and 29% for women.
In that case, the relevant population is 71% men.
I would go so far as to say that the employment rate is effectively always 95%+ for every population and that the only question is whether people are working in the formal economy, in school, informally working, caring, or doing any number of other activities that make up our human society.
Maybe you can't get a mortgage, but you can get a house.
Is that actually worse than getting a mortgage?
I don't know but I think it becomes obvious that you are not employed the moment you want to move out. The house becomes a prison.
Less than 50% are employed 5 years after arrival, in a country with 5.7% unemployment.
I imagine adults who don't speak the language, require financial assistance, etc, will be a net drain from a tax perspective on a society, esp. when you factor in the high CoL. Its hard enough for the average naturalized citizen to be a net positive from a tax perspective, let alone someone from an entirely different world. An inconvenient/unpopular, but obvious truth.