While the number of new asylum seekers is falling, the proportion of those receiving protection in Germany is growing. According to information from the federal government, the adjusted protection rate of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bamf) was 47.4 percent in the first half of 2026. In 2025 as a whole it was 37.5 percent. The adjusted quota excludes formal decisions in which the content of the application for protection is not examined. This means that asylum procedures for which another EU country is responsible are not included here.
Family protection recently played an important role: in the first half of 2026, protection status was granted on this basis in 21,195 cases. This corresponded to 45.6 percent of the positive decisions, where deportation bans are also taken into account.
Main country of origin Afghanistan
As the federal government also reported in a response to a parliamentary question from the Left Party, the adjusted protection rate for people from Iran was 42.2 percent in the first half of the year, and for people from Afghanistan it was as high as 89.3 percent. Afghanistan was also the most important country of origin for people who applied for asylum in Germany in the first half of the year. The number of refugees from Syria has fallen as a result of the change of power in Damascus. War refugees from Ukraine do not have to apply for asylum in the states of the European Union, but are accepted on the basis of the so-called mass influx directive.
Disenfranchisement and persecution of women
One factor for the increase in the protection rate is a ruling by the European Court of Justice from October 2024. It found that women from the country, which has been ruled by the Islamist Taliban again since 2021, are generally entitled to protection. As can be seen from the federal government's response, which is available to the German Press Agency, in the first half of this year almost 95 percent of decisions regarding Afghan women were granted protection status.
Only three criminal charges for false statements
The penal regulation against incorrect or incomplete information in the asylum procedure, which has been in force since February 2024, has so far had little practical relevance. According to the federal government, there have been a total of three criminal complaints filed by the Bamf since the new regulation came into force. One of them was discontinued due to insignificance or lack of public interest. “Many of these measures prove to be unhelpful in practice,” said the Left Party’s refugee policy spokeswoman, Clara Bünger.
More than half do not present official identification
The number of people applying for asylum in Germany for the first time was significantly lower in the first half of the year with 39,646 initial applications than in the same period last year (72,818 initial applications). The proportion of applicants who did not present a passport, an identity card or passport replacement documents was 61.3 percent during this period. It was particularly high for applicants who said they came from Somalia, Algeria, Guinea or Eritrea.
According to the federal government, Bamf employees only relatively rarely decide to have an applicant's cell phone scanned without ID in order to check their information about origin and identity.
As the Interior Ministry explains in its response to the left-wing faction, in the first six months of this year, 3.5 percent of first-time applicants' mobile data carriers were read without a passport or passport replacement. The federal government explains that this relatively complex process allows relevant information to be obtained in individual cases. In the first half of this year, 853 cell phones were read. However, ultimately only 263 reports were released and evaluated.
Only some of the asylum seekers enter the country illegally
The left-wing faction criticizes the federal government for being too focused on unauthorized entries and internal border controls. However, among the asylum applicants there are also numerous people who either entered the country with a visa or who came as tourists from countries of origin that do not require a visa. According to the federal government, this affected more than 5,500 asylum applicants in the first three months of this year. Most of them come from Afghanistan, Syria, Turkey and Iran. A total of 3,290 asylum seekers came in the first half of the year from countries whose citizens can enter as tourists without a visa, such as Georgia, Moldova and Venezuela.
A further 6,962 initial asylum applications were made in the first half of 2026 for children of refugees who were born in Germany. That was around 17.6 percent of all initial asylum applications.
