Alternative for Germany (AfD)’s Jan Wenzel Schmidt (R), member of Germany’s lower house of parliament Bundestag and AfD’s Christian von Hoffmeister sing “Germany, Germany above all”, the tabooed verse of the German national anthem, together with singer Emilio Pons and Stefano Forte (3rd R), president of the New York Young Republican Club, at a gathering, in a Manhattan club in New York City, U.S., October 2, 2025, in this screengarb from a video. REUTERS/Maria Tsvetkova
In this the first of a two-part series, the author writes on Germany’s experience of allowing refugees and asylum-seekers that has contributed to a growing anti-foreigner mindset among common people
It was called the ‘refugee summer’. That year, 2015, saw two sides of Germany on display. One was the Willkommenskultur or ‘welcome culture’ wherein volunteers greeted asylum-seekers arriving at German railway stations with refreshments. Another was a four-fold spike in attacks on refugee shelters, as social anxiety surged about the new mouths to feed.
Over the two year period of 2015-16, a total of 1.2 million asylum-seekers entered Germany, the largest movement of conflict refugees into the country since World War II. On 31 August 2015, then German Chancellor Angela Merkel memorably told her fellow-citizens, ‘We can do it’.
She was referring to Germany’s capacity to absorb the economic strain that a refugee influx would pose. In July, the country had received 76,000 asylum-seekers. The following month, the number jumped to 170,000. Merkel was echoing the confident assessment of her own finance minister, who a day earlier, had used the same words.
Her critics alleged that the chancellor’s message to Germans was ‘you can do it’. They insisted she foisted an unfair burden on millions of ordinary Germans, while scoring narrow political points for herself. The real issue, according to this view, was not whether the country could bear the financial strain of the refugee crisis. Highlighting the healthy state of the German economy in 2015 was after all, a not-so-subtle way of trumpeting Merkel’s own achievements.
Rather, the question was how German citizens could plan for their physical safety in an environment flooded by potentially millions of undocumented persons? There was no answer, other than to dispute whether the refugee presence would lead to a deterioration of public safety.
Politics of Fear
To understand the deep psychological insecurity which opponents of Merkel spoke to, it is necessary to appreciate how regulated life is in many European states. Carrying a form of personal identification, although not strictly required by law, is advisable if one is over a certain age (16 years in the case of Germany) and wishes to avoid detainment during a random police check.
This applies especially to persons of non-European appearance, such as Africans, Arabs and Asians, regardless of their citizenship status. Back in 2012, a German court ruled that police who patrolled trains operating along certain routes, could demand to see identification documents from foreign-looking persons even if there was no suspicion that such persons were involved in wrongdoing.
The concept of ‘stranger-danger’ is therefore embedded in the European consciousness, due to how the state surveils (and controls) residents who do not look local. This sense of vulnerability was underscored on New Years Eve 2015, when over 500 crimes, 40% of a sexual nature, were committed in the city of Cologne by men.
The attackers were predominantly of Middle Eastern or North African appearance. Across Germany, 900 sex crimes were committed that evening, with perpetrators operating in large mobs that overwhelmed the capacity of law enforcement agencies to later identify and prosecute offenders.
What happened in Cologne gave wings to the political fortunes of a far-right party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which has since gone on to become Germany’s second-largest party in 2025. Despite having 152 seats in the 630-member Bundestag (federal parliament), the party has been controversially described by the German domestic intelligence service as being ‘right wing extremist’.
The current German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, recently landed himself in a controversy when he implied that the presence of migrants in German cities was a threat to local womenfolk. Under pressure to retract, he doubled down but with an important qualification, making clear that he was opposed to undocumented migrants, not foreign workers who were in Germany on valid visas, and whose services the country needed.
Observers speculate that Merz was trying to dent the popularity of the AfD by adopting some of its rhetoric. They suggest that such tactics are doomed because emulation serves as the sincerest form of flattery, fostering an impression that the far-right is actually correct (or, in the right) when criticizing migration.
A Catch-Call Term
In part, the issue is over how ‘migrant’ is used in German political discourse. In the context of debates surrounding crime levels in Germany, it is used to mean ‘asylum-seekers’. Unofficially, the term has been applied to ‘foreigners’, regardless of whether they have a legal authorization to live and work in Germany or not. A few numbers are in order to explain the difference.
Roughly 26% of people living in Germany have a ‘migration background’. This broad category includes asylum-seekers, as well as foreign workers who may or may not require entry visas (depending on whether they are citizens of another European country which has an agreement permitting free movement of labour with Germany, such as the other European Union states), and lastly, German citizens with one non-German parent.
A smaller proportion of the total resident population in Germany, 17%, are foreigners who do not hold German passports. A very small number are actually asylum-seekers, around 4%. Yet, the 17% who can be labeled ‘foreigners’ have been disproportionately represented in criminal cases where suspects could be identified. Around 42% of all crimes have featured the involvement of foreign nationals, with asylum-seekers specifically making up 18% of the total number of criminal suspects.
One explanation offered for why migrants (here, referring only to asylum-seekers) are over-represented in crime statistics is that many migrants reside in urban areas where crime rates are already high. According to this theory, it is less the non-German identity of the migrants which is the problem and more the specific localities where they live, which pull them towards criminal activities.
Another theory is that a crime is more likely to be registered when the offender is a migrant, compared to when the offender is a native-born German. Uncertain about how to navigate cultural and linguistic differences, many Germans prefer to involve the police right from the outset instead of dealing with the conflict situation privately.
The Unspeakable
The problem with such explanations is that they do not address trends which have been observed in cases of sexually-motivated crime. Between 2004 and 2015, the rate of such crimes slightly decreased in Germany, but in 2016-17, when Germany was struggling to absorb the refugee flood stemming from the Syrian Civil War, a significant increase was recorded.
One explanation, provided by the German authorities, was that the definition of sexual crimes was widened in 2016 to include other offences. However, this was only offered as a partial explanation and no further attempt was made at accounting for the 2016 surge. The rate of sex crimes decreased slightly in 2018 but thereafter continued rising, with a sharp increase in 2022.
Coincidentally, that same year the Ukraine war led to another massive refugee crisis across Europe. One sensationalist claim is that in the following year, 2023, there were almost two-gang rapes occurring daily in Germany and in just under 48% of cases, the suspects were foreigners.
It is difficult therefore, to escape the conclusion that the possibility of a correlation between levels of illegal (some prefer the term ‘irregular’) immigration and that of sexually-motivated crimes must at least be explored. However, German bureaucratic discourse does not venture into this politically dangerous territory, meaning that the task of asking awkward questions is left to vigilante journalism.
One study holds that following the 2015 Cologne attacks, German electronic media focused six times as much on the ethnic origin of criminals as it did before. This might possibly have been because in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, either due to a failure of internal communication within the Cologne police department or in a clumsy effort to hide the truth of what had happened, the authorities released a misleading statement that the New Year’s festivities had passed off without incident. They only undermined their own credibility.
Things became worse when journalists with some of the leading media houses attempted to project the attacks as a result of failed efforts at assimilating earlier waves of migrants, rather than due to the mis-behaviour of the most recently-arrived migrants themselves. Their efforts to deflect blame from the Merkel government seem to have been motivated by alarm over the AfD’s rise, and how the party could see its popular support boosted by what had happened in Cologne.
Even before the events of New Year’s Eve 2015, a narrow majority of Germans (53% according to a survey) had started to feel that media projections of the refugees’ suitability for the German labour market were over-stated. Such skepticism played to the message of the AfD, which argued that political correctness had gripped the country’s media establishment.
Since then, the pendulum might have swung in the other direction. An October 2025 study has found that media reporting mentioned foreign-origin suspects three times more than their actual share in official statistics on violent crimes. Considering that the recorded level of foreign suspects in violent crimes was 34.3%, this would suggest that as per the impression generated by German news coverage, practically all serious crimes are perpetrated by foreigners.
A journalism professor associated with the second study claimed that when stories are selected, ‘many intuitive decisions result in a pattern of reporting that follows a right-wing populist agenda.’
Prem Mahadevan is Senior Analyst, Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, in Switzerland
