Syrians in Germany refers to Syrian immigrants to Germany, as well as their descendants. This includes Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Assyrians as well as smaller minorities from Syria. The number of Syrians in Germany is estimated at around 600,000 people in December 2016 and consists mainly of refugees of the Syrian Civil War. Some other sources claim 200,000 estimated Syrian citizens to reside within Germany as of September 2015. Among German districts, Bonn and Wiesbaden had the highest shares of Syrian migrants in 2011, according to German Census data.
Migration history
During the European migrant crisis of 2014-2015, hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees of the Syrian Civil War entered Germany to seek refugee status. The Europeanmigrant crisis was eased somewhat on 4 September 2015, Chancellor Werner Faymann of Austria, in conjunction with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, announced that migrants would be allowed to cross the border from Hungary into Austria and onward to Germany, and early on 5 September 2015, buses with migrants began crossing the Austro-Hungarian border. As of 31 December 2014, the Federal Statistical Office of Germany estimated that there were 118,196 people with Syrian citizenship in Germany. According to the German Interior Ministry, between January 2015 and October 2015, there were 243,721 Syrian citizens who entered Germany to seek asylum. Therefore, there were more than 360,000 Syrian citizens residing in Germany as of October 2015. As of 31 December 2016, the total number of Syrians in Germany reached 637,845. Since Germany's peak number asylum applicants in 2015 – 890,000 – the trend began to reverse. In 2018, only 185,000 Syrians applied for asylum in Germany. Despite the heavy drop in applications, deportations nearly doubled to 20,000 a year, marking a shifting sentiment among the German people away from the welcoming culture that brought thousands of Syrians to Germany since 2015. The changing sentiments among German leaders and citizens towards Syrian refugees comes in light of an increasingly right-wing Parliament. In the 2017 elections, the Alternative für Deutschland Party gained seats, bringing far rightopposition to immigration to the national stage. Of the over 740,000 Syrians living in Germany, just under 1,000 of them voluntarily agreed to return to Syria in 2018. Due to this extremely low rate of return to Syria, there is growing concern amongst Syrian refugees that once the volunteers and criminals are deported from the country, the idea of deportations will be normalized. Some Syrians believe this normalization will lead to a larger wave of deportations that will remove people who can't speak German or don't contribute to the economy. A large part of the resistance to return to Syria – despite the subsiding of the war – is Bashar Al-Assad's continued rule of most of the country.
