German cities have reported an easing of the national immigration ’emergency’ after asylum claims were cut by half amid a crackdown by Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
It comes after the newly elected chancellor scrapped Angela Merkel’s open border policy by issuing orders to turn undocumented migrants away from the nation.
September will mark the tenth anniversary of the peak of the European migration crisis, when then-Chancellor Merkel announced she would keep Germany’s borders open to more than a million asylum seekers over the following year.
But Alexander Dobrindt, Germany’s interior minister, rescinded Merkel’s 2015 order in May, meaning everyone without proper documentation, apart from children and pregnant women, would be turned away if they tried to enter Germany from a neighbouring country.
Since Merkel’s order, the country granted protection to 3.5 million refugees, including many fleeing civil war in Syria, and about around 1.2 million Ukrainians seeking safety from Russia’s full-scale invasion.
But during Merz’s election campaign, he made reducing immigration a top policy on his agenda, and he went on to revoke Merkel’s order on his first day in office.
Dobrindt ordered a massive increase in border force personnel, with local media reporting that a further 3,000 cops would be brought in for a total of 14,000 border guards.
Merz also said Syrians would be deported back to their home country and suspended family reunification rights for migrants who fall short of full asylum status.
The move came following a spate of knife and car attacks carried out by non-Germans that galvanised support for the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
Since the start of 2025, there were 61,336 new asylum applications, half as many as were recorded over the same period last year.
And now, Germany has lost its title as the EU’s prime destination for asylum seekers, having fallen behind Spain and France.
Towns have recorded a significant drop in pressure on public services since the country’s immigration policy shifted, according to the Association of German Cities, which represents about 3,200 municipal authorities across the nation.
‘In some towns there were still emergency accommodation facilities in tents, because otherwise there wouldn’t have been places for [the asylum seekers] to stay. Now this kind of emergency accommodation can in some cases be dismantled,’ Christian Schuchardt, the organisation’s director, told Augsburger Allgemeine.
The reasons behind the drop in the arrival of asylum seekers are disputed. While Merz’s government has claimed credit – citing its stringent border measures as an effective deterrent – some suggest the figures had already begun to drop before he took office in May.
Allies of Olaf Scholz, the former chancellor of Germany, say the tide was already turning under the centre-left politician’s leadership, due to his policies which included steps to turn away several categories of asylum seekers, and the deployment ‘temporary’ controls across the nation’s entire land border.
But data suggests that the figures have less to do with Germany’s policies and more to do with broader patterns in the geopolitics of the EU – where irregular crossings into the bloc as a whole fell by 38 per cent last year, according to Frontex.
It comes as popularity for the hard-right AfD has surged, with the party becoming the most popular in the country, according to the results of a new poll.
The party, that was formally designated as extremist by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) in May, is the largest opposition party in Germany’s Bundestag.
During federal elections in February, it won a record 152 seats in the 30-seat parliament, nagging almost 21 percent of the vote.
