Asylum seekers from Turkey: who is actually coming to Germany?

Turkey was supposed to become an EU member just a few years ago. Now the country is storming the charts of asylum countries of origin. However, most asylum seekers do not identify themselves as Turks.

Berlin - The number of Kurdish asylum seekers from Turkey reached a record high last year. Around 53,000 Kurds with Turkish passports applied for asylum in Germany, according to a response from the federal government to a request from the Left Party in the Bundestag. Accordingly, they made up 84 percent of all asylum applications from the country on the Bosphorus.

A total of around 61,000 applications were submitted by Turkish citizens, which corresponds to an increase of 156 percent compared to the previous year in 2022. They were the second largest group of asylum seekers in Germany. With the increase, the recognition rate fell drastically. While it was 48 percent in 2019, it fell to 28 percent by 2022. Last year it was 13 percent.

Kurds not persecuted in Turkey
The recognition rate for Kurdish people is being depressed. In Germany you hardly have any prospect of a positive asylum decision. Only 4.5 percent of the applications were approved. Among Turks, however, around every second application (54.5 percent) was accepted.

The reason: The responsible German authority, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, does not recognize any persecution of Kurds in Turkey because of their ethnicity. Applicants were recognized as refugees in only 623 of the 19,687 procedures. For this purpose, the asylum seeker must be persecuted in the country of origin according to Section 3 of the Asylum Act “because of his race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a certain social group”.

For this reason, around 1,900 Turkish citizens received a positive decision last year. A total of around 3,900 applications were decided.

Source: Junge Freiheit