© Reuters/Stoyan NenovPeople put their luggage in a bus departing from Sofia's central bus station to London via Austria, Germany and France January 2, 2014.
Germany has become the second most popular immigration destination after the US, overtaking Canada and Australia. New figures by Germany's statistics reveal a spike by 13 percent over 2013 alone.
The latest provisional figures from the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) show the number of people moving to Germany jumping to 1,226,000. Over the same period, 789,000 people left the country.
The majority of those figures were non-German immigrants coming from European Union countries (727,000), with Poland as the top country of origin (189,000), Deutsche Welle reported.
The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) provided the information on Germany becoming the second most popular country for immigrants, which represents "a boom - without any exaggeration," Thomas Liebig, an expert on international migration in the organization, told Reuters.
"No other OECD country experienced such a rise," he added.
Germany reached the second place in the 2012 already, according to the latest data. Three years earlier, it occupied the eighth place.
Annually, the number of migrants soared by 400,000 people, or 38 percent in 2012. Migrants from other European countries were the majority of the wave.
Most came from Eastern Europe, but
increasing numbers were leaving the crisis-hit southern Europe (Spain, Portugal, Greece) for strong economy and stable labor market.
Comment: Statistics report China has an aging population with over nine million burials every year. It is running out of space as urban cemeteries are nearing capacity and prices are skyrocketing for burial plots. The term "grave slave" describes a generation that must work hard simply to afford the the burials of themselves, their parents and ongoing cemetery payments.