Germany still looks German on a tourist map. The census does not. Official figures for 2025 put the country at about 83.5 million people. Roughly 71 million hold German citizenship. About 12.4 million do not, by the population count; the foreigners register lists more than 14 million. More than a quarter of people in private households—21.8 million—have an immigration history: they arrived after 1950, or both parents did. That share is still rising. The population with no immigration history fell by nearly half a million in a year.
This is not a trickle from next door. It is a replacement of the birth ledger.
Who Lives There Now
One in five residents immigrated themselves—16.4 million people. The largest foreign-citizen groups include Turks, Ukrainians, Syrians, Romanians, Poles, Afghans, and Iraqis. Asia accounts for more than three million foreign citizens; Africa more than 800,000. Syrians remain the single largest source of new passports. In 2025 Germany naturalized a record 332,500 people. One in five of those new citizens had been Syrian.
The age pyramid tells the rest. Immigration history is about 36 percent among people in their late twenties and early thirties and only about 14 percent among those over 65. The future electorate is not the present one.
Births make that permanent. Germany recorded about 654,000 live births in 2025. The fertility rate fell to 1.32 children per woman, the lowest since the late 1990s. German citizen mothers: 1.20. Foreign citizen mothers: 1.78. Nearly three in ten babies had a foreign mother. Native numbers do not replace themselves. Immigrant numbers, unevenly, do.
What the Crime Tables Show
Overall recorded crime fell in 2025. That sentence gets used as a lullaby. Read the suspect columns.
Police counted about 2.05 million suspects, down from the year before. Non-German suspects were 40 percent of the total when immigration-law offenses are included, and 35.5 percent when those offenses are stripped out. Non-citizens are about 15 percent of the population. The official suspect rate for non-Germans, excluding immigration violations, is still about 2.6 times the German rate.
Violent crime fell slightly, to about 212,000 cases. Sexual offenses rose 2.8 percent, to about 131,000. Temporary migrants—asylum seekers, people with temporary status, people here illegally—were 8.8 percent of suspects in the prior year’s report, far above their share of the population. Some nationalities appear in the suspect lists at rates well above their population share. A younger, more male newcomer population explains part of that. It does not explain it away. Germans who were naturalized last year show up tomorrow as “German” suspects. Citizenship paperwork is not a crime vaccine.
None of this is a claim that every newcomer is a criminal. Most are not. Overrepresentation in violence, robbery, and sex offenses is still the fact that city governments and women on night trains live with. Falling total crime and a rising foreign share of the serious stuff can happen at the same time. Germany is living that combination.
New data shows roughly four in 10 violent crime suspects in Germany are non-citizens, reigniting a debate Berlin has spent a decade trying to manage rather than answerhttps://t.co/oMb4Bi6x56
— The New York Sun (@NewYorkSun) August 29, 2026
What It Predicts If America Copies the Intake
The lesson is not “immigration is crime.” The lesson is selection, volume, and speed.
When a low-fertility country imports large numbers of military-age men from disordered states, faster than it can screen, house, or assimilate them, two things happen. The citizen stock ages and shrinks. The new stock is younger, more male, and drawn from places where the state never monopolized violence. Crime rates then split by origin even if headline totals drift down. Naturalization hides the split in the next decade’s tables.
America is not Germany. It is larger, more used to absorption, and still capable of choosing who comes. That is the point. If the intake is skilled, lawful, and limited, the German pattern is not destiny. If the intake is the same mix Germany took after 2015—asylum as a route, family reunification as a multiplier, passports as a finishing school—the same arithmetic applies. Young men from high-violence countries do not become suburban accountants because a press office says “diversity.” They become a police category.
Curtailing illegal entry and low-skill, low-vetting inflows is not mysticism. It is reading a European spreadsheet before the same rows appear in American cities. Germany is showing what happens when the people who already live in a country stop having children and the state fills the gap from the hardest neighborhoods on earth. The future is not a speech. It is a birth certificate and a suspect form. Choose the first list with more care than Berlin did.