The German government handed out a record number of citizenships to immigrants last year, rising to nearly a quarter of a million passports with Syrian and Turkish nationals representing the largest cohorts.
According to data collected by 13 of 16 federal states in Germany and provided to the Welt Am Sonntag newspaper, 249,901 foreigners were granted citizenship in 2024, the highest number since records began in 2000. This number surpassed the previous record set in 2023, when 200,095 people were awarded citizenship.
Last year’s record naturalisation number is likely much higher, given that the states of Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Schleswig-Holstein did not provide naturalisation records, with data set for release in the coming weeks.
Once again, Syrians and Turks were the main ethnic groups recorded as obtaining German citizenship. However, the paper did note a noticeable increase in the number of Russians being naturalised.
General Manager of the German Association of Cities Helmut Dedy told Welt that the significant increase in the number of citizenships handed out was a result of the immigration reforms implemented by the previous ‘traffic light’ coalition government of ex-Chancellor Olaf Scholz last year, which reduced the number of years spent in the country to become eligible down from eight to five years.
“Many people who came to us during the major refugee movements in 2015 and 2016 are now submitting applications or have already done so,” Dedy added.
Although the recently installed government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz has focused heavily on the controversial “turbo-naturalisations” also passed under the preceding government, which allow for high-performing migrants to obtain citizenship after just three years, Welt noted that such cases are exceedingly rare, with on Berlin having even broke in the hundreds of passports handed out last year.
Thus, critics have accused Chancellor Merz of political gamesmanship by vowing to reverse the turbo programme while refusing to roll back the standard to an eight-year wait.
“The turbo naturalisations are a nice example of the fact that pure symbolic politics alone does not necessarily have to correspond to the concrete reality of life“, said the President of the German District Council, Achim Brötel.
While successive German governments have claimed that they need migrants to fill jobs, a recent study from the Federal Employment Agency (BA) found that 33 per cent of all long-term unemployed last year were migrants, with 317,000 out of the 972,000 being foreigners.
Again, the true figure is likely much higher, as the study did not include migrants who obtained German citizenship. Still, it represented a significant increase, with around 187,000 long-term unemployed being foreign in 2018.
The mass migration agenda imposed upon Germany by successive globalist governments in Berlin has radically transformed the country’s demographic makeup. According to Destatis, the proportion of people with a “migration background” (either migrants or people with at least one migrant parent) represented over 30 per cent of the population, or over 25 million people.
The issue of migration has become one of the top issues according to Germans, particularly in the wake of several high-profile terror attacks over the past year, suspected of being committed by migrants, including in Mannheim, Solingen, Magdeburg, Aschaffenburg, and Munich.