Germany

1. Official institutions

• Destatis (Statistisches Bundesamt): https://www.destatis.de
• BAMF (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge) — Federal Office for Migration and Refugees
• IAB (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung) — Institute for Employment Research, linked to the Federal Employment Agency
• BKA (Bundeskriminalamt) — Federal Criminal Police Office, publisher of the PKS (Polizeiliche Kriminalstatistik, police crime statistics), which distinguishes nationals from foreigners

2. Key datasets

• Destatis: Mikrozensus (sample census), population by “Migrationshintergrund” (migration background, a category including the second generation)
• PKS (BKA): crime statistics by nationality, a very detailed and media-sensitive annual report (the “Zuwanderer,” or migrant, category is tracked separately)
• IAB: studies on the labor market integration of refugees (2015-2016 arrival cohorts)

3. Demographics

3.1 Current population composition

• Population with a Migrationshintergrund in 2024: 21.2 million people, or 25.6% of the total population, up 1 percentage point from 2023. Cumulative net migration of 6.5 million people since 2015. Source: Destatis, press release no. 181 of May 14, 2025 — https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2025/05/PD25_181_125.html
• “Migrationshintergrund” (Destatis/Mikrozensus): a statistical category grouping people who themselves immigrated (first generation) together with people born in Germany but with at least one parent who immigrated or was born abroad (second generation and beyond, depending on the survey).
• Note: a separate dataset consulted for this research (2025 preliminary figures, published April 2026) shows a higher figure — 25.76 million people, or 31.1% of the population, with a migration background. The two figures are not directly comparable, since they refer to different reference years and one is a confirmed (2024) versus a preliminary (2025) result. This page uses the confirmed 2024 figure (25.6%) as its reference value. Reference source: Destatis, “Bevölkerung mit Migrationshintergrund nach Altersgruppen” — https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/Migration-Integration/Tabellen/migrationshintergrund-alter.html

3.2 Origin breakdown

3.3 Immigration waves (1950s – present)

• 1955–1973: under bilateral agreements with Italy (1955), Greece and Spain (1960), Turkey (1961), Morocco (1963), Portugal (1964), Tunisia (1965), and the former Yugoslavia (1968), approximately 14 million “Gastarbeiter” (guest workers) entered West Germany. The peak year was 1970 (around 1 million arrivals). Following the 1973 recruitment freeze after the oil crisis, 11 million of the 14 million returned to their home countries. Source: bpb, “Geschichte der Migration in Deutschland” — https://www.bpb.de/themen/migration-integration/dossier-migration/252241/geschichte-der-migration-in-deutschland/
• 1988–2011: arrival of approximately 3.1 million ethnic German resettlers (Aussiedler/Spätaussiedler) from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The cumulative total since 1950 reaches approximately 4.5 million. 1990 (the year of German reunification) was the single peak year, with approximately 400,000 arrivals. Source: bpb (link above)
• 2015–2016: sharp rise in asylum applications driven in part by the Syrian civil war. BAMF-registered asylum applications (first plus follow-up) reached 476,649 in 2015 and peaked at 745,545 in 2016 (the widely cited figure of “>1 million arrivals” in 2015–2016 conflates EASY entry-registration counts with formal asylum applications; the two series should not be equated). Verification note: the URL originally cited for this statistic (“Das Bundesamt in Zahlen 2016”) now returns a 404 error. The figures 476,649 and 745,545 match the order of magnitude documented elsewhere (BAMF, Destatis) for those two years, but could not be reconfirmed by direct reading of an active primary source during this research — to be cross-checked against an up-to-date BAMF URL before final publication.
• 2022 – present: reception of Ukrainian refugees (temporary protection status) following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

3.4 Age structure by origin (population pyramid)

3.5 Long-term projection

4. Public finances — net cost

• IW Köln (an economic research institute funded by German employers’ federations — a private institute): a January 2017 statement estimating the cost of integrating refugees arrived since 2015 at up to €28 billion per year, partly recoverable through tax revenue if investment in training is effective; medium-term effect estimated at +€90 billion in cumulative GDP through 2020, but a slightly negative effect on per-capita income and net fiscal balance. Source: IW Köln, press release no. 6/2017, “Migrationseffekte” — https://www.iwkoeln.de/fileadmin/publikationen/2017/321603/IW-Pressemitteilung_6_2017_Migrationseffekte.pdf (the PDF could not be verified in full by the automated verification tool; the figure is taken from the institute’s public summary and should be cross-checked against the full publication before final citation)
• DIW Berlin (an economic research institute funded mostly by federal/Berlin state public funds), with IAB, in a study commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Labour (BMAS): DIW Wochenbericht 3/2017 estimates an average net fiscal deficit of €2.1 billion per year through 2030 for the refugee cohort that arrived in 2015 (about 0.07% of 2015 GDP, or €26 per capita), reducible to roughly €11 billion in cumulative savings by 2030 if language-integration and training efforts are strengthened. Source: DIW Berlin/IAB, DIW Wochenbericht 3/2017 (study commissioned by BMAS) — the source PDF could not be verified in full by the automated verification tool; figures are taken from the institutional summary and should be cross-checked before final citation.
• No quantified and directly verifiable study from the ifo Institute could be confirmed by direct consultation of its website (publications available only as PDFs that could not be extracted during verification). The three institutes (IW Köln, DIW Berlin, ifo) use different generational accounting or net fiscal balance methodologies, which partly explains the divergence in results; this methodological point should be treated as an unsettled debate rather than a consensus figure.

4.1 Pension system / contributor-to-pensioner ratio

5. Labor market

• IAB: for the cohort of Syrian refugees who arrived in 2015, the employment rate was 64% in 2024 (9 years after arrival), versus a national average across all statuses of 70% (a 6-point gap). The gap is much wider by gender: refugee men 76% (above the national male average of 72%); refugee women 35% versus a national female average of 70% (a 35-point gap). Source: IAB, “10 Jahre Fluchtmigration: Beschäftigungsquote von Geflüchteten nähert sich dem Durchschnitt in Deutschland an” — https://iab.de/presseinfo/10-jahre-fluchtmigration-beschaeftigungsquote-von-gefluechteten-naehert-sich-dem-durchschnitt-in-deutschland-an/

6. Security / justice

• PKS (BKA): one of the most detailed reports in Europe, distinguishing nationality and residence status, with a recurring debate over its interpretation (the effect of migrants’ age/sex structure).
• According to the BKA’s 2024 PKS tables, suspects (“Tatverdächtige”) of non-German nationality represented approximately 17.6% of all suspects recorded in 2024 (17.9% in 2023), including offenses against foreigners’ law; excluding offenses specific to foreigners’ law, there were approximately 696,873 non-German suspects versus 1,270,858 German suspects. The BKA itself notes that the non-German population has a markedly younger and more male demographic structure than the German population, two factors statistically associated with a higher crime burden regardless of nationality; the TVBZ indicator (Tatverdächtigenbelastungszahl, suspect burden rate) is designed to partly neutralize this structural effect in comparisons. Source: BKA, Polizeiliche Kriminalstatistik (PKS) 2024, “Bund TV Nationalität” tables — https://www.bka.de/DE/AktuelleInformationen/StatistikenLagebilder/PolizeilicheKriminalstatistik/PKS2024/PKSTabellen/BundTVNationalitaet/bundTVNationalitaet.html (the aggregate figures cited here come from the tables linked on this page; detailed values appear in associated Excel files, which were not fully extracted by the automated verification tool — to be cross-checked before final publication)

7. Education

• PISA 2022 (OECD) and analysis by the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs (Kultusministerkonferenz, KMK): only around 52% of young people with a Migrationshintergrund spoke German at home in 2022, down from about 72% in 2012; among first-generation students (born abroad), only 13% spoke German at home, versus 36% in 2012. The KMK notes that performance gaps between students with a Migrationshintergrund and those without are largely explained by socioeconomic factors and by the use of German at home, particularly for the second generation. Source: Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK), press release of December 5, 2023 on PISA 2022 — https://www.kmk.org/aktuelles/pressearchiv/mitteilung/pisa.html

8. Housing

• Destatis, Mikrozensus 2022: living space per person of 56.5 m² (homeowners without a migration background) and 45.5 m² (renters without a migration background), versus 43.0 m² (homeowners with a migration background) and 31.2 m² (renters with a migration background) — a gap of about 14 m² per person among renters. These four living-space figures were confirmed by direct reading of the source. Homeownership rate: the figure of 46.4% (without Migrationshintergrund) versus 22.1% (with Migrationshintergrund) could not be confirmed as such on this page — the source table does not directly publish a homeownership rate as a percentage, only raw counts by tenure status requiring a calculation; two attempts to calculate the rate from the raw counts produced results different from those cited (on the order of 47-54% for the population without a Migrationshintergrund, depending on method). This figure needs to be recalculated and precisely requalified before final publication, rather than confirmed as is. Source: Destatis, Mikrozensus 2022, “Bevölkerung nach Migrationsstatus und Wohnfläche” table — https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/Migration-Integration/Tabellen/bevoelkerung-migstatus-typ-wohnflaeche.html
• Detailed data on the share of Migrationshintergrund within social housing proper (subsidized housing, “sozialer Wohnungsbau”): data not publicly available in an aggregated, national form via Destatis; social housing statistics in Germany are managed at the state (Länder) level and are not systematically cross-tabulated with migration status in accessible federal publications.

9. Social cohesion

• SVR-Integrationsbarometer (SVR-Integrationsbarometer, published by the Sachverständigenrat für Integration und Migration — an independent expert council funded by German foundations, notably the Stiftung Mercator and the Bertelsmann Stiftung) 2024: integration climate index (“Integrationsklima-Index”) at 66.3 out of 100, stable compared with 2020 but down from 68.5 in 2022. Survey conducted among 15,020 people between November 2023 and July 2024. Source: SVR, “SVR-Integrationsbarometer 2024” — https://www.svr-migration.de/presse/svr-integrationsbarometer-2024/

10. Recent political context

• On August 31, 2015, at the federal government’s summer press conference, Chancellor Angela Merkel said “Wir schaffen das” (“we will manage this”) regarding the reception of refugees, shortly after the Federal Ministry of the Interior published a projection of around 800,000 expected asylum applications for the year. The phrase, little commented on at the time, later became the retrospective symbol of the 2015-2016 reception policy (known as “Willkommenskultur,” welcome culture). Source: Bundesregierung, “Vor allem ein Satz des Anpackens” — https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/aktuelles/-vor-allem-ein-satz-des-anpackens--353854
• The “Gesetz zur Verbesserung der Rückführung” (Return Improvement Act, Rückführungsverbesserungsgesetz) was passed by the Bundestag at the end of January 2024, approved by the Bundesrat on February 2, 2024 without referral to the mediation committee, published in the Federal Law Gazette (BGBl. 2024 I no. 54) on February 26, 2024, and entered into force in most respects on February 27, 2024. It expands the authorities’ powers to locate and identify people under an obligation to leave the country, to prevent disappearances before a deportation measure, and also amends provisions of the asylum procedure and of the Asylbewerberleistungsgesetz (Asylum Seekers’ Benefits Act). Source: Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI), “Rückführungsverbesserungsgesetz im Bundestag beschlossen” — https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/kurzmeldungen/DE/2024/01/bt_verbesserte_rueckfuehrung.html
• The Federal Ministry of the Interior ordered, effective September 16, 2024, temporary checks at the land borders with France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark, in addition to checks already in place since October 16, 2023 at the borders with Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, and Switzerland — thereby extending checks to all of Germany’s land borders, with the possibility of refusing entry (Zurückweisungen) by the Federal Police (Bundespolizei). These checks have been renewed in six-month periods, notably by a decision of Interior Minister Nancy Faeser in February 2025. Source: Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI), “Begrenzung irregulärer Migration und Schutz der inneren Sicherheit: Binnengrenzkontrollen an allen deutschen Landgrenzen ab dem 16. September 2024” — https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/pressemitteilungen/DE/2024/09/binnengrenzkontrollen_pm.html
• Asylum seekers generally fall under the Asylbewerberleistungsgesetz (Asylum Seekers’ Benefits Act) rather than the Bürgergeld (the standard basic income support); benefit amounts under the AsylbLG are set by decree and periodically reassessed. The Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (BMAS) published the benefit rates applicable since January 1, 2024 (a new schedule including the possibility of paying part of the allowance via a payment card rather than in cash starting in 2024); the rates applicable since January 1, 2026 were published in the Federal Law Gazette on October 27, 2025 (for example, €455 per month for a single person). Source: Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (BMAS), “Leistungssätze nach dem Asylbewerberleistungsgesetz” — https://www.bmas.de/DE/Soziales/Sozialhilfe/LeistungenAsylbewerberleistungsgesetz/leistungssaetze-asylbewerberleistungsgesetz.html
• Since November 2025, the federal government (a CDU/CSU-SPD coalition led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz, in office since May 2025) has decided that Ukrainian refugees who arrived in Germany after April 1, 2025 fall under the Asylbewerberleistungsgesetz rather than the Bürgergeld, implementing a goal set out in the coalition agreement — resulting in reduced benefits for this group compared with the previous regime. Source: Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (BMAS), “Leistungssätze nach dem Asylbewerberleistungsgesetz” — https://www.bmas.de/DE/Soziales/Sozialhilfe/LeistungenAsylbewerberleistungsgesetz/leistungssaetze-asylbewerberleistungsgesetz.html
• Data not publicly available: press reports indicate that upon taking office in early May 2025, Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (Merz government) ordered the Federal Police to step up entry refusals (Zurückweisungen), a measure that neighboring countries reportedly challenged as incompatible with EU law; however, no official BMI document confirming the exact content of this instruction could be directly consulted and verified during this research (BMI pages were inaccessible at the time of verification). In keeping with this observatory’s editorial charter, this point is therefore not asserted as an established fact until an official primary source has been successfully consulted.

11. Data limitations and biases