More than 100,000 asylum applications have already been submitted in Germany this year. The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) recorded exactly 103,467 initial applications by the end of May. That was 18 percent less than in the first five months of the previous year. In May, the BAMF also received 17,231 initial applications, slightly fewer than in April – that corresponds to a decrease of 1.5 percent.
In a long-term comparison, however, the current level of asylum immigration is still significantly higher than the values for the years 2017 to 2022 and the period before the migration crisis of 2015/2016.
The main countries of origin in 2024 will remain Syria, Afghanistan and Turkey. 60 percent of the approximately 100,000 applicants come from these three countries.
With the new BAMF data, it is now official: The Federal Republic has exceeded the figure of 100,000 asylum applications every year for twelve years in a row. In 2013, with 127,000 applications, this was the case for the first time since the Balkan wars of the 1990s. While many politicians today consider 100,000 asylum applications per year to be a rather low level, at the time, before the extreme years of the great migration crisis, exceeding the 100,000 mark was seen as a warning signal.
The then Federal Minister of the Interior, Thomas de Maizière (CDU), warned urgently when presenting the 2013 asylum balance that “the number of asylum applications had again increased significantly by more than 60 percent compared to the previous year.” “Higher numbers were last recorded in 1999.” “Compared to the other EU member states, Germany had by far the highest number of asylum seekers in 2013,” de Maizière explained at the time.
Germany still holds this leading position today. Other heavily affected target countries such as the Netherlands and Great Britain are trying to significantly reduce this form of immigration – despite having lower asylum immigration than Germany in absolute numbers and in relation to population size. Countries such as Sweden and Denmark have already implemented a permanent reduction. The Netherlands, for example, currently want to enforce restrictive measures on the entry and care of asylum seekers and, if necessary, declare an “asylum emergency” for a period of two years, which can be used to suspend the processing of applications.
The federal government has also reacted to the significant increase in the number of asylum seekers in the past year with a number of measures, such as extending stationary controls to the border regions with Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland and only later increasing social assistance for rejected asylum seekers to the level of the citizen’s allowance. They now only receive these benefits after 36 months and not after 18, as had long been the practice in Germany.
Following the deadly knife attack in Mannheim and shortly before the EU elections next Sunday, the German government is currently changing course and has announced that it will seriously attempt to deport some Afghans or Syrians who have committed particularly serious crimes to these dictatorships.
Sweden, for example, which was the main destination country in the EU alongside Germany during the crisis around 2015, but then permanently reduced its immigration, is also more active in this respect: according to the border police there, the Nordic state managed five returns to Syria and Afghanistan last year. The former main destination country of Sweden only recorded around 3,200 asylum applications in the current year up to the end of April, while in Germany there were already more than 80,000 at that time.
