Such an influx of migrants had never been seen in modern German history
German Chancellor Angela Merkel expects that their total number by the end of 2015 will be one million. In other words, in just one year, almost a third of the number of those who sought asylum in Germany over the past 14 years will arrive. BAMF keeps a record of such applications. Using these statistics, one can trace how the situation with asylum seekers in Germany has changed over the past decades.
First wave of refugees
In the early 1990s, the number of asylum seekers in Germany rose to a level the country had not seen in its post-war history. The peak came in 1992: about 440,000 applications for asylum were submitted, almost twice as many as the year before. The majority of refugees came from the countries of the former Yugoslavia, which was then in the midst of a civil war, as well as from neighboring Romania.
The relevant authorities could barely cope with registering, distributing, and providing migrants with everything they needed. Meanwhile, discontent with the government's policy grew among the population. As a result, in December 1992, the Bundestag amended the legislation regulating the procedure for granting political asylum in Germany. The amendments aimed at speeding up decision-making in each individual case and curbing abuse of the right to asylum.
Under the new rules, only migrants who were actually subjected to political persecution in their home country could obtain political refugee status. In a number of other cases, for example, if there was a threat of the death penalty in the country of origin, foreigners also had the right to stay in Germany, but without the package of state assistance that those who received political asylum received.
Consequences of legislative changes
Due to the legislative changes, as well as the end of the war in the countries of the former Yugoslavia and the stabilization of the situation in Eastern Europe, the number of asylum seekers in Germany decreased significantly. In 1993, there were 322,599 of them, and in the following two years, 128,000 each.
Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, the number of applications for political asylum in Germany continued to decline. In 2007, a minimum since 1990 was recorded – 19,164 such petitions. After that, the number of refugees arriving in Germany began to rise again; in 2014, 202,800 people filed applications.
As Deutsche Welle notes, this process reflects the situation worldwide. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), at the end of 2013, there were a total of 51.2 million refugees worldwide.
Mirror of armed conflicts
The list of countries from which migrants arrived in Germany over the past decades has changed. In the 1990s, due to the war in Yugoslavia and the fall of the Iron Curtain, most foreigners seeking refugee status in Germany came from European countries (including the republics of the former Soviet Union and Turkey). From 2000 to 2012, they were mainly citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq, linked to armed conflicts in those countries.
In general, the situation in a particular region of the world strongly influenced the influx of refugees from that region to Germany. For example, in 2009, Kurds made up 79.5 percent of refugees from Turkey arriving in Germany and 45.9 percent from Iraq. And 45.9 percent of Russians who asked German authorities for asylum were from Chechnya. In 2011, when the civil war in Syria began, the majority of refugees reaching Germany were Syrians. This situation persists to this day.
2015 breaks all records
From January to October 2015, German authorities received 362,153 applications for political asylum. However, the actual number of refugees who arrived was much higher. The fact is that not all of them managed to submit applications. To do so, they first had to be registered, distributed to a particular federal state, and only there they could write the corresponding application.
As for registration, between January and the end of October, 758,000 refugees underwent this procedure in Germany. But even this number is less than the actual number of migrants who arrived in the country during that period. The problem is that over the last few months, the influx has increased so much that the authorities simply could not keep up with registration. So no one currently knows how many refugees have arrived in Germany so far.