The number of migrants seeking asylum in Germany, not including Ukrainians, hit a post-2016 record last year, according to data released by the left-liberal government.
Over 200,000 migrants sought asylum status in Germany in 2022, a press release from the German government said on Wednesday, with the leading European Union member-state seeing its highest number of applicants since 2016.
It comes as public opinion on mass migration in both Germany and Europe at large is souring significantly.
Such negative sentiments have likely not been aided by recent migrant riots that took place on New Year’s Eve, with foreign and foreign-background residents being heavily involved in widespread vandalising of property and attacks on members of the emergency services.
According to a report by Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, Germany received a total of 217,774 first-time asylum applications in 2022 — a 46.9 per cent increase on the previous year’s figure.
This number reportedly does not include the additional influx of around one million refugees from Ukraine, who are said to be processed outside Germany’s regular asylum system.
Die Welt reports last year saw the sixth-highest number of yearly arrivals in Germany’s history, with the only years trumping it being 1991-1993 — during the Balkan wars — and the height of the migrant crisis in 2015-16.
Of those arriving in the country, just over 72,000 are claimed to be Syrian, with 41,000 Afghans, 25,000 from Turkey, and 16,000 from Iraq.
A further 8,800 are said to originate from Georgia, a country on the border of Europe and Asia involved in a frozen conflict with Russia.
The new record number of arrivals in Germany comes as the country itself becomes increasing multicultural, with government data indicating that as many as one in four people in the country now have a migration background.
Such a major demographic shift is even more visible in parts of the German school system, with migration background pupils making up a majority of pupils in 994 out of 2,787 elementary schools in one state, for example.
However, with some locations and even cities in the country seeing natives become the minority, public opinion has begun to turn against the mass influx of foreign arrivals.
According to polling taken late last year, only slightly over a third of people think that refugees arriving in Germany are a good thing — a response lower than that of Canada, the United States, and even Poland, which has generally been more sceptical of mass migration than its western neighbour.
Meanwhile, only 42 per cent of people in the country now believe that globalisation is a good thing for Germany — a sizable drop from the 54 per cent who had a positive view of it in 2019.
“Since the beginning of the study, we have clearly seen a decline in positive perceptions of some aspects of globalisation,” the director of YouGov, which is responsible for the study, remarked.
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