One in Five Germans Is Now an Immigrant. The Crime Numbers Are Impossible To Ignore

In the southwestern German city of Trier this July, a 22-year-old student was walking roughly 1,000 feet from the university campus on a Wednesday morning when a man attacked him with a knife and fled. Paramedics attempted to revive him at the scene, behind a privacy screen shielding him from onlookers, before he was pronounced dead at a hospital. Police apprehended a 22-year-old Afghan national nearby within the hour.In the days that followed, more than 1,000 people packed the street where the victim bled out, laying flowers in silence for a stranger whose death had already become a referendum on the country’s future — a memorial far larger than the crime itself would ordinarily draw.The case fed directly into a debate the country has been having with itself for a decade, one that new national numbers have made harder to wave off.Germany’s latest crime figures, released this spring by the Federal Criminal Police Office, have handed the country’s migration debate something it has rarely had — numbers too specific to argue away. According to the 2025 Police Crime Statistics, or PKS, foreign nationals were listed as suspects in 41 percent of violent offenses and 38 percent of homicides last year, despite making up just under 20 percent of the population. In Bavaria, Berlin, and Baden-Württemberg, close to half of all violent crime suspects were non-German.The release comes against a demographic shift that is, by any measure, historic. The Federal Statistical Office, or Destatis, reported this year that 21.8 million people in Germany — 26.3 percent of the population — either immigrated themselves or were born to two immigrant parents, up from roughly 13 million in 2005, a 67 percent increase in two decades.The divide between citizen and non-citizen suspect rates is real; however, explaining it is another matter entirely.“It’s hard for most people to accept that there are these large gaps. The question is why,” the director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, Steven Camarota, tells The New York Sun. “In America we have similar issues, and it’s hard to explain all the differences.”Mr. Camarota brings up America for a reason. Economists here have tried for years to explain away crime gaps between demographic groups using income alone, and it hasn’t worked — the gaps hold even as poverty falls away as a variable. He indicates that Germany is headed for the same wall. Age, unemployment, urban density, pick any single factor, and the numbers still won’t add up cleanly.So which is it: a demographic shift that Germany can no longer put off reckoning with, or a broken integration system getting mistaken for something darker about the people it failed to absorb?The Numbers Behind the HeadlineBroken down by nationality, the picture gets starker still. Police recorded 163 violent-crime suspects per 100,000 German citizens last year, compared with 1,740 per 100,000 Syrian nationals and 1,722 per 100,000 Afghan nationals, roughly a tenfold gap, according to a German government response to a parliamentary inquiry.The disparity stays wide even after police adjust for the fact that migrants skew younger and more male than the German population overall. However, the government’s own figures caution that population baselines for some nationality-and-age subgroups run well under 100,000, which can make the rate look more extreme than the raw numbers alone would suggest.Several researchers who study the numbers closely say the headline figures overstate the picture. Police statistics track nationality, not migration background, and the category of foreign nationals sweeps in people who are in Germany illegally, criminal tourists, and rejected asylum seekers who are not counted in the population figures used for comparison, according to a professor at the ZHAW School of Social Work’s Institute of Delinquency and Crime Prevention, Dirk Baier.In other words, the same offense can get counted twice — inflating the suspect tally without a single additional crime being committed.“We know from studies that foreign offenders are reported to the police more frequently than German offenders,” Mr. Baier tells the Sun, underscoring that among youth, a foreign suspect in a violent case is reported to police roughly twice as often as a German one. “Since police crime statistics only include reported offenses, they are skewed against the foreign population.”A professor of economics at the University of Bamberg who heads the department for international comparisons and European integration goes further, arguing that once demographics are held constant, the disparity mostly disappears.“The gap is not very large if we control for age, gender and the urban-rural divide. Young German males in large cities are not much less criminal than immigrant males in the same place,” the professor, Herbert Brücker, tells the Sun.Germany’s homicide rate, just 0.9 per 100,000 people, kept falling even as immigration surged, a fact Mr. Brücker uses to push back on the broader narrative. The United States, by comparison, sits at 5.8 homicides per 100,000, according to United Nations figures.Germany looks demonstrably different than it did 20 years ago — that much isn’t in dispute. What the country hasn’t settled is what that shift means for how it polices, integrates, and talks about the people driving it.A Country Transformed, but UnevenlyThe Destatis figures show a population aging in two directions at once. Germans without a migration background average 47.4 years old; those with one average 38.2, and second-generation Germans average just 25. More than a third of Germans aged 25 to 34 now have a migration background, compared with 14 percent of seniors.Mr. Brücker cautions against treating that figure as a single story about refugees. Of the roughly 30 percent of the population with a migration background, he says, only about 20 percent of arrivals since 2010 have come as refugees, while 45 percent are European Union citizens. Employment among immigrants has climbed 10 percentage points since 2010 to more than 70 percent — a figure that puts Germany ahead of most EU peers on labor-market integration, according to a 2024 OECD report — and their net fiscal contribution to Germany is positive and large.Officials disagree over what to do about the minority of cases driving the crime figures. A senior director at the Counter Extremism Project, Hans-Jakob Schindler, points to an overwhelmed integration system rather than any administrative bias in how crimes are recorded.“What the statistic reflects is the fact that the integration system for refugees in Germany has been overstretched for several years, meaning integration for a large number of individuals was incomplete, not particularly effective and not efficient enough,” Mr. Schindler tells the Sun, citing years-long delays before refugees can obtain work permits.Even so, he stresses, “the absolute majority of refugees in Germany do not become criminal at any point in their integration process.”Where Officials Disagree on WhyPart of what makes this debate so hard to settle is that the same numbers can shrink or grow depending on how you slice them. Adjust for age and gender, as Mr. Brücker does, and the disparity gets smaller. Factor in how often police get called on foreigners versus Germans for the same behavior, as Mr. Baier does, and it shrinks further. Or take the raw numbers at face value, the way the government’s own PKS report does, and the gap looks big enough to swing an election.None of these approaches is wrong, exactly — they’re just answering slightly different questions. That’s why politicians looking at the same police report keep walking away with opposite conclusions.Mr. Baier, for one, rejects the idea that nationality itself explains anything.“If all foreign nationals in Germany were granted German citizenship tomorrow, nothing would change in their behavior, and therefore nothing would change in their criminal behavior either,” he tells the Sun. He points instead to age, social disadvantage, and attitudes toward violence carried over from migrants’ countries of origin and their upbringing.Still, he points out, Germans commit 60 percent of all crimes in Germany, and more than 95 percent of migrants commit none at all.Mr. Camarota is more willing to name culture as a factor.“The cultural gap between, say, sub-Saharan Africans, Middle Easterners, and South Asians — people from the Indian subcontinent, and Germans is enormous. It’s not just about religiosity or attitudes toward women,” he tells the Sun, contending that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 policies accelerated a trend already under way. “You could say Merkel put it on steroids.”The Political ReckoningChancellor Friedrich Merz now has little room to maneuver. His government has tightened asylum rules and sent the first deportation flight of Afghan nationals back to Kabul under a Taliban-mediated arrangement, with a similar deal for Syria still being negotiated. Mr. Merz has, however, ruled out working with the far-right Alternative for Germany, even as that party climbs in the polls on the strength of exactly this issue.Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt, meanwhile, has said migrants who work and obey the law have earned their place in Germany, while those who pose security risks have not.Mr. Camarota argues Washington should watch closely, proposing that asylum seekers be processed in a safe third country rather than allowed to await rulings inside the destination nation itself. Neither Europe nor America does this in practice, he says, for related but distinct reasons.Within the European Union, free movement means member states try to spread asylum seekers across the bloc rather than route them through a non-EU country first, and some destinations are seen as more desirable to live in than others, which undercuts any incentive to cooperate with a third-country arrangement.In America, Mr. Camarota argues, the problem isn’t so much a difference in law as word getting around. Once a backlog forms — and one did, badly, under the Biden administration — people abroad hear that a claim can sit unprocessed for years while the applicant is released to wait it out inside the country, working and living freely in the meantime. That reputation feeds on itself: The more crowded the system gets, Mr. Camarota explains, the more attractive it looks to the next person deciding whether to try.“Asylum is not a search for a better life. It’s not about giving workers to employers. It’s not about joining family members. It’s about one thing — saving your life,” he says. “If you don’t talk about it responsibly, it feeds bad tendencies. And if you don’t talk about it responsibly, someone else will come along and talk about it irresponsibly.

One in Five Germans Is Now an Immigrant. The Crime Numbers Are Impossible To Ignore

One in Five Germans Is Now an Immigrant. The Crime Numbers Are Impossible To Ignore

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