The overwhelming majority of the German public is dissatisfied with the performance of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s coalition government on immigration.
A survey from INSA on behalf of Berlin’s BILD newspaper this week found that 78 per cent of voters do not think that the government has sufficiently addressed the immigration issue. In contrast, just 11 per cent of voters agreed with Chancellor Merz’s declaration that “large parts” of the migrant crisis have been solved.
Perhaps more crucially, even supporters of the Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its regional sister party, the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU), remain pessimistic over the government’s performance, one year after coming to power, with 73 per cent of Union voters disagreeing with the Chancellor compared to 20 per cent who agreed.
The Merz government has managed to bring down illegal immigration compared to its predecessor, run by the Social Democrats, with whom Merz had to partner to form a government last year, but not by a consequential degree. Federal police identified around 62,000 cases of illegal entries in 2025, down from 83,572 in the previous year and from 127,549 in 2023.
The number of first-time asylum applications has dropped significantly, however, with 113,236 initial applications in 2025, compared to 229,751 in 2024, and 329,120 in 2023.
Nevertheless deportations, particularly to migrant hotspots such as Afghanistan and Syria, remain limited, with just around 22,000 migrants being removed from the country last year.
Regardless of the cuts in illegal immigration and asylum applications, the impacts of mass migration policies over the past ten years, following former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s unilateral decision to open the gates of Europe to the Middle East and Africa, are likely to be felt for decades to come.
Indeed, the immense scale of migration into Germany has meant that around one in five people are foreign migrants, totalling 16.4 million. This figure jumps much higher when counting the children of immigrants, those with an “immigration history”, which now accounts for 22 million people or 26.3 per cent of the total population.
This has not only had a significant impact on the cultural landscape of Germany but also on real-world issues, such as crime. According to recent figures from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), foreign nationals accounted for 42.9 per cent of all suspects. The true impact of migration on crime is likely much higher, however, as this figure does not include migrants who became German citizens or the children of immigrants to the country.
Migrants are also significantly over-represented among welfare recipients, with government figures revealed in 2024 showing that 48 per cent of people who benefitted from Germany’s Bürgergeld — ‘citizen’s allowance’ — welfare scheme were foreigners at 2.7 million claimants.
Despite the clear over-representation of migrants on the welfare rolls, the government’s Labour Minister, Bärbel Bas, sparked controversy last week by claiming that no one was immigrating to Germany for its social welfare programmes. Amazingly, the government did not back the minister, claiming that she was speaking for herself.
CDU lawmaker Johannes Winkel remarked: “Everyone knows that there are millions of immigrants entering our social system. This results in billions of dollars in costs for taxpayers and those insured. There is simply no point in denying the reality.”
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