Germany has seen the number of illegal migrants trying to enter the country drop to its lowest level in over a decade – barring the first year of the pandemic. The astonishing reduction has happened on the watch of Germany‘s CDU Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
The Conservative politician had pledged to crackdown on immigration during federal elections in 2025. In the first eleven months of last year, 106,298 first-time asylum applications were recorded by the national migration agency Bamf. This puts Germany on course for its smallest annual total since 2013. By way of comparison, the figure in 2024 was over double, at 229,751.
Last year, the federal police, responsible for controlling the border, registered 62,526 illegal entries, half as many as in 2023.
Meanwhile, nearly 75% of the 33,000 people who attempted to cross the frontier between May and December were either rejected or, in 58 cases, physically escorted back to the other side.
There has been a large reduction in refugees travelling to the European Union from Belarus, the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean. This has been put down to geopolitical shifts in the Middle East and Poland’s improved policing on its eastern border.
However, flows from Libya to the EU increased significantly in the first six months of 2025, with 27,000 arrivals in Italy and over 7,000 in Greece, respectively twice and three times as many as in the same period last year.
The Central Mediterranean remained the EU’s busiest migratory corridor in 2025, responsible for nearly 40% of all irregular entries this year.
Germany has also been in the midst of a mild but protracted economic slowdown, making the country less attractive to migrant workers.
But Merz has taken a pro-active approach to slashing refugee numbers, implementing a number of hard hitting policies.
German police are under orders to turn back virtually all undocumented migrants at the border.
He has scrapped voluntary humanitarian refugee intake schemes, as well as suspending family reunifications.
Some of Merz’s coalition partners are demanding further measures. One of these – The Christian Social Union, which controls the national interior ministry – is calling for most of Germany’s 950,000 Syrians to be sent back and for regular deportation flights to Taliban-governed Afghanistan.
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