The number of refugees in Germany reached a new record in mid-2023, the German government said in response to a parliamentary question from the far-left party Die Linke.
At the end of June, around 3.48 million refugees with various residence permits were living in the country, or around 60,000 more than at the end of 2022, 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 refuge in Germany after Russia launched a large-scale invasion in February of that year.
Unlike the statistics on asylum applications, the Central Register of Aliens, to which the federal government refers in its response, also takes into account departures.
According to the federal government, the number of people 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 had to leave Germany but were still in the country. People from Iraq formed the largest group among them. Almost 20% of them were legally obliged to leave Germany, but four out of five of them were allowed to stay under a policy of tolerance.
Tolerated persons are persons who are obliged to leave, but are not expelled for certain reasons. Examples of these are the lack of identification documents, illness or because they have a child who does have a residence permit.
By comparison, at the end of 2023, there were around 243,000 people in Germany who had to leave the country. Of these, around 194,000 were tolerated.
