Only 18% of asylum seekers are accepted.
The new figures released by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge) show that the acceptance rate for asylum applications in Germany during the first four months of 2025 was only 18.22 percent. Out of 110,077 applications processed, 90,018 were rejected, while only 20,059 were approved.
The recognition rate for refugees from Afghanistan was the highest, with 18,635 applications processed, and more than half of them (51.8%) received protection. As for asylum applications from Turkey, the acceptance rate was only 8.3% out of 23,924 cases. For Russia, the rate did not exceed 4.3% out of 5,419 decisions. Colombia recorded an extremely low rate, with protection granted in only 0.4% of 2,499 decisions.
The situation was worse for Syrians, as the acceptance rate did not exceed 0.2% out of 9,731 cases, due to the political ambiguity in the country after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad. Since December 9, 2024, the processing of Syrian applications has been temporarily suspended, and there are still no clear decisions regarding granting protection to Syrian refugees.
In light of this decline in acceptance rates, the head of the Federal Office recently called for a radical change in asylum policy. The new German government has already begun tightening its policies towards refugees and plans to implement stricter measures in the future. On the other hand, Germany recorded a significant decrease in the number of new asylum applications. Between January and April 2025, 45,681 initial applications were registered, compared to 84,984 applications in the same period of 2024. Syria topped the list of countries submitting applications with 11,644 applications, followed by Afghanistan with 7,873, and Turkey with 4,749 applications.
As for deportations, only 8,163 cases were executed during the same period, while 11,753 deportation attempts failed. Some countries canceled deportations or refused to accept deportees at the last moment. In 2024, 20,084 rejected refugees were deported, while deportations failed in 33,717 cases.
Even deportations to EU countries under the Dublin system face obstacles. Germany requested the deportation of 15,279 people to European countries they initially entered at the beginning of 2025, and those countries agreed to 11,054 cases, but only 2,230 deportations were actually carried out. In 2024, only 5,827 deportations were executed out of 74,583 requests. According to the newspaper "Bild", the reasons are multiple, including the disappearance of refugees before the deportation is carried out, or the other countries' requirement for strict timelines that are difficult to adhere to.