Crimes may be committed both against and by immigrants in Germany. Crimes involving foreigners (German: Ausländerkriminalität) have been a longstanding theme in public debates in Germany. In November 2015, a report that was released by the Federal Criminal Police (BKA) stated that "While the number of refugees is rising very dynamically, the development of crime does not increase to the same extent." Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière (CDU) noted that "refugees are on average delinquent as little or as often as comparison groups of the local population." A 2018 statistical study by researchers at the University of Magdeburg using 2009-2015 data argued that, where analysis is restricted to crimes involving at least one German victim and one refugee suspect and crimes by immigrants against other immigrants are excluded, there is no relationship between the scale of refugee inflow and the crime rate. In 2018 the interior ministry under Horst Seehofer (CSU) published, for the first time, an analysis of the Federal Police Statistic (German: ), which includes all those who came via the asylum system to Germany. The report found that the immigrant group, which makes up about 2% of the overall population, contains 8.5% of all suspects, after violations against Germany's alien law are excluded.
Availability and reliability of statistics Several studies carried out since the 1990s have suggested that the collection of accurate and meaningful statistics makes it difficult to obtain an overall picture of the effect of immigration on crime in Germany. For example, second or third generation immigrants may be classified as "foreigners" whilst recent immigrants may be classified as German. Research also suggests that crimes are more likely to be reported, if the suspect is or appears to be a foreigner or immigrant. Because each of Germany's 16 states has its own police force, federal authorities do not routinely publish national statistics. These are compiled state by state and are sometimes released only after a parliamentary request.
"Guest worker" era in the 1950s-1980s The (Foreigners Act) of 1965 attempted to control immigration to West Germany.
During the 1950s and 1960s, a group known as Gastarbeiter participated in an organised immigration programme to the former West Germany because of labour shortages in the country. The former East Germany also had labour shortages but their "guest worker" programme tended to encourage immigration from other socialist and communist countries. Although the German government did not plan the program as a permanent method of keeping the "guest workers", after unification and the reform of German Naturalization Laws of the 1990s, former "guest workers" increasingly became German citizens. The first generation of "guest workers" did not have an elevated crime rate, but studies carried out in the 1970s and 1980s suggested that second- and third-generation immigrants had higher crime rates than their German contemporaries who were not from an immigrant background.
A 1991 LMU Munich study covering the preceding two decades found that crime rates were higher among immigrants with a strongly different cultural background from Germans. Under the guest worker programme, Turks and Yugoslavs had far higher crime rates than Spaniards and Portuguese, while the highest crime rates were recorded among individuals from third world countries. For third world countries, the immigrants were first generation.
Trends in criminal activity since the 1990s Studies in the early 2000s tended to show little correlation between migrants and crime in Germany.
From the start of 2015 to the end of 2017, 1,356,600 asylum seekers were registered in total. According to a 2018 study by German criminologists, the crime rate of non-Germans between the ages of 16 and 30 is within the same range as that of Germans. In May 2016, U.S. fact-checker Politifact suggested that, as crimes by immigrants rose 79 percent in 2015 and the number of refugees in the country rose by 440 percent, the crime rate among refugees was lower than that among German natives.
In November 2015, a report by the Federal Criminal Police (BKA) stated that "While the number of refugees is rising very dynamically, the development of crime does not increase to the same extent." The report noted that refugees from Kosovo, Serbia and North Macedonia were overrepresented and Iraqis were underrepresented. It did not contain representation for refugees from North Africa.
From 2015 to 2016, the number of suspected crimes by refugees, asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants increased by 52.7% percent to 175,438. Approved refugees were not included in 2016 statistical figures. The figures showed that most of the suspected crimes were by repeat offenders, and that 1 percent of migrants accounted for 40 percent of total migrant crimes. According to police statistics, 31% of immigrant crime suspects were repeat offenders. From 2016 to 2017, the number of crimes committed by refugees, asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants in Germany decreased by 40 percent, which was mostly caused by significantly fewer violations of the alien law, because far fewer asylum seekers entered the country in this year.
The first comprehensive study of the social effects of the one million refugees going to Germany found that it caused "very small increases in crime in particular with respect to drug offenses and fare-dodging." A report released by the German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation in November 2015 found that over the period January–September 2015, the crime rate of refugees was the same as that of native Germans. According to Deutsche Welle, the report "concluded that the majority of crimes committed by refugees (67 percent) consisted of theft, robbery and fraud. Sex crimes made for less than 1 percent of all crimes committed by refugees, while homicide registered the smallest fraction at 0.1 percent." According to the conservative newspaper Die Welts description of the report, the most common crime committed by refugees was not paying fares on public transportation. According to Deutsche Welle's reporting in February 2016 of a report by the German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation, the number of crimes committed by refugees did not rise in proportion to the number of refugees between 2014 and 2015. According to Deutsche Welle, "between 2014 and 2015, the number of crimes committed by refugees increased by 79 percent. Over the same period, the number of refugees in Germany increased by 440 percent."
A 2015 study in the European Economic Review found that the immigration of more than 3 million people of German descent to Germany after the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a significant increase in crime. The effects were strongest in regions with high unemployment, high preexisting crime levels or large shares of foreigners.
The refugee crisis in Germany has increased to above “1.7 million” (Trines, 2019) refugees dating back to 2014. In the year 2014 alone, “…there were 6.1 million offenses recorded by the police” (Reality Check Team BBC News, 2018). The hate crimes committed by German residents alone has become such an issue in the state that there have been studies conducted to find factors that affect the number of these crimes against refugees. Out of the 3,335 attacks on refugees between 2016 and 2017, Karsten Mueller and Carlo Schwarz, researchers at the University of Warwick, noticed a trend with regard to the attacks (Taub & Fisher, 2018). “Towns where Facebook use was higher than average, like Altena, reliably experienced more attacks on refugees. That held true in virtually any sort of community — big city or small town; affluent or struggling; liberal haven or far-right stronghold — suggesting that the link applies universally” (Taub & Fisher, 2018). This information can give German officials an inkling as to where these attacks will occur. Towns like Altena may be a small sample size, but the researchers also found more information regarding attacks in Germany: “Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent. (Taub & Fisher, 2018). These findings allude to the fact that Germans may be just as much at fault for the spike in crime rates since 2014 as the refugees are. Another study done by Yue Huang regarded migrant criminal action on Germans since 2015 and whether or not there was a correlation between the number of immigrants and crimes against Germans (Lindsay, 2019). “The answer to this research question, according to Huang, was fairly clear. ‘We did not find a systematic association between the number of refugees and the number of German victims, in crimes that were committed by refugees’” (Lindsay, 2019). The finding in this study shows that the spikes in crime are not fully attributed to refugees alone.
For several types of crime and drug crime in particular, it was reported that organised crime gangs were dominated by people from countries with high rates of immigration to Germany. In 2017, the most common nationality of foreign organized crime gangs was Albanian with 21 gangs, the great majority of which were active in drug trafficking. In 2017 there were 13 identified Serbian organized crime gangs, active in drug crime, property crime and violent crime. In 2017 there were 12 Kosovar gangs, active in property crime, drug trade and forgeries. Syrian gangs were active in drug trade and drug smuggling.
The Independent reported that in 2017 crime in Germany was at its lowest for 30 years, and that crimes by non-Germans had fallen by 23% to just over 700,000. At the same time, there was a significant increase in politically and racially motivated crime. Out of 462 right-wing offenders with outstanding warrants identified by Germany's Interior Ministry, 104 were wanted for crimes classified as violent and 106 were wanted for crimes classified as politically motivated.
In 2018, the Wall Street Journal analysed German crime statistics for crime suspects and found that the foreigners, overall 12.8% of the population, made up a disproportionate share of crime suspects (34.7%), see horizontal bar chart.
In 2018, the interior ministry's report "Criminality in the context of immigration" (German: Kriminalität im Kontext von Zuwanderung) for the first time summarized and singled out all people who entered Germany via the asylum system. The group called "immigrants" includes all asylum seekers, tolerated people, "unauthorized residents" and all those entitled to protection (subsidiary protected, contingent refugees and refugees under the Geneva Convention and asylum). The group represented roughly 2 percent of the German population by the end of 2017, and was suspected of committing 8.5 percent of crimes (violations of Germany's alien law are not included). The numbers suggest that the differences could at least to some extent have to do with the fact that the refugees are younger and more often male than the average German. The statistics show that the asylum-group is highly overrepresented for some types of crime. They account for 14.3 percent of all suspects in crimes against life (which include murder, manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter), 12.2 percent of sexual offences, 11.4 percent of thefts and 9.7 percent of body injuries The report also shows differences between the origin of migrants. Syrians are underrepresented as suspects, whereas citizens from most African countries, especially northern Africans are strongly overerrepresented. Afghans and Pakistanis are particularly overerrepresented in sexual offenses.