The official number of registered refugees and migrants which entered Germany in 2015 is some 1.1 million, as Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere (61, CDU) said at a press conference today (January6). He also pointed out that the number of refugees might in fact be a bit lower because some of them have been registered multiple times.
428.000 of the 1.1 million came from Syria, roughly 154.000 from Afghanistan and some 122.000 from Iraq. Migrants from the Balkan countries Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro account for some 30 per cent of the asylum-seekers in Germany in 2015.
De Maiziere said: "This tremendous influx has presented us with challenges, as we haven’t seen since the immediate post-war period."
"We will work in all policy areas towards sharply reducing the number of new asylum seekers to Germany," he continued. He answered negatively when a journalist asked him whether the government had made any mistakes regarding its refugee and migrant policy last year.
