Thus, statistics do not take into account the ethnic origin of German citizens, nor people who have some other citizenship in addition to German. There is only data on the number of foreign citizens in the country. Over the past five years, their share in Germany's population has remained virtually unchanged - it is slightly less than 9%, or 7,340 thousand people. The overwhelming majority of them are citizens of other European countries, to which statistics also include Ukraine, Turkey, and Russia.
The Turkish community in Germany is the largest - almost two million people, that is, more than a quarter of all foreigners. In second place are citizens of European Union member states combined. In this group, the largest number are Italians (610 thousand people) and citizens of Serbia and Montenegro (591 thousand). Then in descending order come Greeks, Poles and Croats. There are quite a lot of people from Asia in Germany - 12% of all foreigners. There are three times fewer citizens of African countries, 3% are Americans, and there are almost none from Australia and Oceania - 0.2%. About 70 thousand residents of Germany have no citizenship at all or carefully hide it.
Such are the data of official statistics. As before, the so-called late German resettlers from the republics of the former Soviet Union remain unaccounted for. They receive German citizenship immediately upon arrival, and therefore are not covered by “foreign” statistics. There are only approximate estimates - it is believed that there are about three million of them in Germany.
Separately, it is worth telling about non-German citizens of the former Soviet Union currently living in Germany. According to official statistics for Berlin, only 32 thousand citizens of the former USSR are registered in the German capital. Of these, the largest number are Russians (11 thousand) and Ukrainians (7.5 thousand). Citizens of other republics of the former Union are significantly fewer. From Turkmenistan, for example, only 39 people.
But official statistics are a crooked mirror. It does not take into account, for example, the “Russian” wives of German resettlers who, having received a German passport thanks to their husband, did not give up their previous one - Ukrainian or Russian. The same applies to Jewish refugees. They began to be granted German citizenship without requiring renunciation of Russian, Ukrainian or Belarusian citizenship. Finally, statistics only take into account foreigners registered with the passport offices. But a significant part of Russian speakers in Berlin live without registration, in an illegal or semi-legal status.
For example, holders of a passport from one of the Baltic countries - whether ethnic Russians or Belarusians - can legally stay in Germany for three months without registering, that is, without being included in statistics. Then they need to leave for at least a day and can return again for another three months. And so on indefinitely.
Many people from the CIS republics come to Berlin on tourist visas and remain in the city illegally. They rent a room or a corner somewhere, or get jobs as live-in domestic workers. In the classifieds section of the capital’s newspaper “Russian Berlin”, more than half of the phone numbers of those seeking work are mobile phones. This is a sure sign that the person placing the ad is an illegal immigrant in Berlin. So official statistics do not reflect the real state of affairs. According to generous estimates, up to 200 thousand Russians, or more precisely people from the former USSR, live in Berlin; according to cautious data, 100-130 thousand.
But let us return to official statistics. The average length of stay of foreigners in Germany exceeds 15 years. The record is held by citizens of Slovenia (over a quarter of a century) and Spain (24 years). Moreover, two-thirds of all foreigners in Germany have been here for more than eight years. This means that under the current law they have the right to demand German citizenship. But they do not: a law-abiding and hardworking person does not experience much inconvenience in Germany from having a passport of another state in his pocket.