The German government has broken records for the number of foreigners being given citizenship, with official statistics reporting 200,100 naturalisations in 2023 alone. The main beneficiaries of this trend are young men from Syria.
Under Angela Merkel and the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), borders were seriously weakened. Now even the CDU has warned that the country’s migration policies have “taken a completely wrong turn.” Reactions to the mass naturalisation of Germany’s 14 million foreign-born population—a priority for the ruling left-liberal ‘traffic light’ coalition led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz—help explain the surging popularity of the sovereigntist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) at the polls.
The German Federal Statistics Office reported a jump of more than 40% in naturalisations since 2021, with 75,000 Syrians alone receiving a German passport and the right to vote just last year.
Approximately 5.3 million immigrants who have been residents in Germany for the past ten years could be eligible to receive citizenship under a new law. Future applicants could be required to be residents of Germany for a mere five years (under certain circumstances, three years) before receiving citizenship—down from a previous eight-year residency requirement.
These new progressive plans would alter the country demographically to the point where even establishment politicians are now expressing fears of the rise of political Islam, led by the country’s seven million strong Turkish diaspora community. CDU MP Andrea Lindholz has threatened to undo the measures if her party is elected.
AfD party leader Alice Weidel categorically opposed the naturalisation plans when speaking in the German Bundestag earlier this month, saying that the country risked “the import of foreign conflicts and the influence of foreign powers on growing parts of the German population,” as well as warning of the impact on the country’s public finances.
The Bundestag has been debating migration reform since January, aiming to reduce waiting times to attain citizenship from eight years to five—or, in the case of migrants demonstrating “special integration achievements,” three. This occurred against the backdrop of official statistics that showed Germany receiving 352,000 asylum applications in 2023 alone (not counting Germany’s one million Ukrainian refugees).
