German asylum requests halved in 2025

Ever fewer people are applying for asylum in Germany, according to data issued by the Interior Ministry on Sunday, which put first-time applications at 113,236 in 2025.

That figure is less than half the 229,751 applications registered a year earlier and almost a third of the 329,120 asylum requests filed in 2023.

A report by Bild am Sonntag newspaper put the combined number of first-time and follow-up applications at 168,543, a decline of around 33% from 351,915 in 2023.

Follow-up applications can be filed if circumstances have changed after the initial claim was withdrawn or rejected.

Experts cite several reasons for the steady decline in asylum seekers, including border checks introduced from October 2023 under the previous government and intensified this year under conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

The fall of Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad in late 2024 has also led to a decline in the number of Syrians seeking asylum in Germany.

In Italy, a more restrictive migration policy is thought to have curbed the number of arrivals, with knock-on effects for Germany, while the reverse is said of Spain, where irregular migrants with job prospects have better chances of securing legal status.

The Interior Ministry in Berlin ascribes the changes to a turnaround in German migration policy, characterized by rejections at the borders, a refusal to take in family members, the scrapping of fast-track citizenship applications and an increase in migrant returns.

“The clear signal from Germany, that migration policy in Europe has changed, has reached the rest of the world,” Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said in a statement to Bild am Sonntag.

He said the government was taking a clear and consistent approach to migration.

“Those who have no claim to protection should not come; those who become offenders must leave,” Dobrindt said.

According to the ministry, deportations rose by around 20% last year. Since January 1, there have been new deportations to Afghanistan of people who committed crimes in Germany.