The number of immigrants seeking asylum in Germany has more than doubled since 2020, according to new data.
Last year over 330,000 people sought sanctuary in Germany, which amounted to almost a third of all applications in the EU.
This is more than twice as many as in 2020, when around 130,000 applied for asylum. The upwards trend is also reflected in other EU countries, including Spain and Italy.
Ed Conway from Sky News posted a graph showing the rise in immigration across Europe, including the UK.
In a post to his X social media account, he called the growth in immigration a “big deal”.
“Look at the numbers across Europe and you see them trending upwards. But the UK is not an outlier. And this year is not dramatically different,” he added.
Immigration has become a hot political topic in Germany, following two separate knife attacks by suspected Islamist extremists.
In the summer a total of four people were killed by two knifemen – an Afghan and a Syrian – after they went on the rampage in Mannheim and Solingen.
The attacks have forced Germany’s government into a crackdown on immigration, in an attempt to appease public anger.
Berlin has reestablished regular controls on all its borders, deported 28 Afghans and reduced welfare benefits for certain refugees.
Immigration has continued to rise in 2024, according to government data released in September.
Figures show some 3.48 million refugees with varying types of residency permits were living in Germany at the end of June 2024 — roughly 60,000 more than at the end of 2023.
One-third of these people come from war-torn Ukraine, where Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion in 2022.
Clara Bünger, an MP from The Left party (Die Linke), said the numbers showed that refugees made up just 4% of the population.
She claimed the figures stood “in clear contradiction to the misleading portrayal of an alleged ‘national emergency.'”
A recent report by the Bertelsmann Foundation also noted that Germany’s economy needed immigrants to help boost the country’s workforce.
The study claims that the country’s pool of workers could shrink by 10% by 2040 without “substantial” immigration.
The researchers found that without an influx of around 288,000 skilled foreign workers per year, the size of the German workforce could drop from roughly 46.4 million currently to 41.9 million in 2040.
By 2060, it could fall to as low as 35.1 million.
