Nearly a million migrants have entered Germany through the country’s family reunification scheme since 2015. The German Foreign Office reports that from January to November of this year, the country has issued over 121,000 family reunification visas for migrants, a record surpassing last year’s 117,000 family reunification visas.
The 930,000 immigrants who have come to the country through the scheme are not mentioned in the asylum statistics published by the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), the German news website Nius reports, though many are likely to have come as family members of those granted refugee status.
Added to the estimated 304,581 first-time asylum claims seen in Germany this year between January and November, the total number of non-European Union migrants through both migration avenues would total around 425,000 for 2023.
Family reunification for non-EU citizens is open to those with valid residency permits along with recognized refugees. Spouses, children, life partners and the parents of unaccompanied minor refugees are all eligible for the programme.
Normally, those who are not granted full refugee status but are said to be in a state of subsidiary protection, cannot benefit from the family reunification programme but exceptions can be made in exceptional circumstances, according to BAMF.
In 2020, the European Union-funded website Infomigrants reported that between August of 2019 and June of 2020 around 6,000 family reunification visas were granted to family members of migrants who only had subsidiary protection.
As early as 2018, some were already sounding the alarm over the potential consequences of the phenomenon of ‘chain migration’ in Germany, including former United States ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell.
“Donald Trump talks a lot about chain migration, and that is actually the issue here in Germany—it’s chain migration,” Grenell said.
“Many migrants have been allowed to come in, that was the policy of Chancellor Merkel, I think she has suffered politically by not having a plan that was implemented properly and you saw a lot of political concern in the campaign about chain migration,” he added.
“What does that mean now? Who else gets to come in, and are we checking them? These are challenges for Germany,” he said.
Germany took in over a million asylum seekers during the migration crisis that lasted between 2015 and 2016 but processing their claims took time, with around 1.4 million asylum applications processed by 2017.
While the number of processed applications slowed from 2018 to 2021, they have been on the rise since last year.
In 2022, Germany faced another migration crisis as the Russian invasion of Ukraine led to over a million Ukrainians seeking shelter in Germany, greatly straining the country’s asylum system.
Many of the Ukrainians, primarily women, who fled the conflict are also not expected to ever return to their home country even if the war ends.
So far, family reunification figures do not apply to Ukrainians as Ukrainian nationals are allowed to freely enter the European Union on their own and claim temporary protection under a measure that was recently extended until March of 2025.
Germany’s current federal government, the so-called traffic light coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the Free Democrats (FDP), have pushed to expand family reunification even further to allow those with only subsidiary protection, rather than full refugee status, to bring their family members to Germany.
In June of this year, the Bundestag voted 388 to 234 to relax family reunification requirements for migrant workers and allow them to not only bring their blood relatives but also members of their extended family to Germany.
Skilled labour shortages have long been a catalyst for calls for more migration to Germany, with German Economy and Climate Protection Minister Robert Habeck stating last year that the country required more immigrants to fill job openings.
“We have 300,000 job openings today and expect that to climb to a million and more,” he said and added, “Naturally, (this means) better combining qualifications, training and possibilities for families and jobs, but in Germany certainly stepped-up immigration as well, and in all areas, for engineers, crafts people, carers. We have to organise this.”
Many asylum seekers, however, have been revealed to have far greater rates of unemployment than native Germans.
The German statistical office Destatis noted last year that the employment rate of Syrians was just 35% and for Afghan nationals, it was only 45%. The report stated the figures were partially to blame on low levels of education as just 21% of Afghans had a high school equivalent qualification, along with just 38% of Syrians.
As the German government looks to expand family reunification and other avenues of immigration into Germany, it is unclear if the majority of the migrants who actually arrive will fill those labour gaps in skilled trades and other industries that require specialised training.
Germany is one of the countries in Europe that has been changed the most demographically by mass migration, with a 2019 report claiming that by 2040, as many as a third of all German residents will come from migration backgrounds and that the rate could be as high as 70% in some of the country’s cities.
