Number of refugees in Germany reaches to new high in mid-2024

The number of refugees in Germany reached a new high in mid-2024, the federal government stated in response to a parliamentary question from the far-left Die Linke (The Left) party.

About 3.48 million refugees with varying residency permits were living in the country at the end of June, or about 60,000 more than at the end of 2023, the figure released on Friday showed. The information was first reported by the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung newspaper.

The number of refugees was particularly high in 2022, when hundreds of thousands of war refugees from Ukraine sought shelter in Germany after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February of that year.

Unlike the statistics on asylum applications, the Central Register of Foreigners, which the federal government referred to in its response, also takes departures into account.

According to the federal government, the number of those legally required to leave the country fell slightly in the first half of this year.

As of June 30, there were 226,882 foreigners who were required to leave Germany but who were still in the country. People from Iraq made up the largest group among them. Almost 20% of them were legally required to leave Germany, but four out of five of those were allowed to stay under a tolerance policy.

Tolerated individuals are people who are obliged to leave, but are not deported for certain reasons, which can include a lack of identification documents, an illness or because they have a child who has a residence permit.

By way of comparison, at the end of 2023, around 243,000 people required to leave the country were staying in Germany, of whom around 194,000 were tolerated.

Clara Bünger, a legal policy expert for Die Linke, called for an end to "all measures aimed at expelling people without the right to remain from the country." She said that the law introduced by the current federal government sets the bar too high, but that it nevertheless opened the way for many people to a secure right of residence.

This aspect of immigration law came into force on December 31, 2022. It applies to people who have been in Germany with a tolerated stay, a residence permit or a permit for at least five years as of the cut-off date of October 31, 2022. They and their relatives can receive a kind of probationary residence permit for 18 months.