Data issued by the German Federal Statistics Office showed today (Tuesday) that the country granted its nationality to a number of 291955 individuals last year, an increase of 46 percent from 2023, and that the largest number was the share of the Syrians.
The office stated that the amendments to the Nationality Law contributed to this jump. Last June, Germany reduced the conditions for residency for naturalization from eight to five years and even to three years in special cases.
With these amendments, many Syrians who reached refugees in 2015 and 2016 when former Chancellor Angela Merkel opened her country’s borders to hundreds of thousands of fleeing war in the Middle East qualified to obtain citizenship during 2024.
The Syrians accounted for the largest group of new citizens, with 83,150 people, representing 28 percent of all cases of naturalization, an increase of 10.1 percent. They were followed by the Turks, the Iraqis, the Russians, and the Afghans, who made up eight percent, five percent, four percent, four percent and three percent of the total, respectively.
The Russians had the largest increase in centenary in the number of naturalized people, and their number increased to 12980 in 2024 of 1995 in the previous year. The number of Turks who obtained German citizenship for more than 2,2525 increased.
The new citizenship law also allows individuals to maintain their original nationality while obtaining German citizenship, allowing tens of thousands of Turkish citizens, many of whom or their ancestors came to Germany to work in the 1960s and 1970s, to obtain German citizenship.
The new coalition government in Germany is planning to retract some of these measures and re -impose a five -year waiting period to obtain citizenship.
Conservatives believe that nationality must come at the end of the integration period, not “launch”, and they are afraid that the failure of the waiting period in order to obtain German citizenship will lead to an increase in immigration and the exacerbation of public discontent.
